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STUDIES IN ROMANCE PHILOLOGY AND 
LITERATURE 



DIDEROT AS A 
DISCIPLE OF ENGLISH THOUGHT 



" II est clair, pour tous ceux qui ont des yeux, 
que sans les Anglais la raison et la philosophic 
seraient encore dans l'enfance la plus meprisable 
en France . . . ." 

Diderot a Catherine II, 1775. 



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DIDEROT 



AS A 



DISCIPLE OF ENGLISH THOUGHT 



\ BY 

R. LOYALTY CRU 



Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements 

for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the 

Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University 



JReto got* 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1913 



Mo>ii> 5^Trd.^Y> 



,C 7 

\9*3au 



Copyright, 1913 
By Columbia University Press 



Printed from type. Published May, 1913 



Gift 

The University 
DEC i9 1913 



PRESS OF 

THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY 

LANCASTER, PA. 



To 
JOHN VISCOUNT MOELEY, 

WHOSE WORKS ON 

VOLTAIRE, ROUSSEAU 

AND 

DIDEROT AND THE ENCYCLOPEDISTS 

ARE THE SINCEREST STUDIES 

YET DEVOTED, IN ANY LANGUAGE, 

TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS DISCIPLES OP ENGLISH THOUGHT 
WHO ILLUMINED EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE 
AND INFLUENCED THE DESTINIES OF THE WORLD, 

THIS BOOK 

IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED 



CONTENTS 

Page 

Introduction 1 



CHAPTER I 

Diderot's Life and General Relationship to 

England 19 

Diderot's early years. — New importance of 
modern languages. — Which are most neces- 
sary in the eighteenth century? — Impression 
created by Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques. 
— Diderot's needy years. — He learns English. 
— His dislike for traveling. — Marriage. 

Diderot's literary career. — Translations 
from the English for the booksellers. — The 
Encyclopedie. — Diderot's early writings. — 
His imprisonment. — Posthumous works. 

Second-hand knowledge of England. — Eng- 
lish spleen. — The English Parliament, and 
other topics. — The question of patriotism. — A 
recantation. — Holbach's impressions of Eng- 
land. — " Paris, when shall I isee thee 
again ¥ " — Diderot's unfavorable reflections 
on England. — Blots in the scutcheon. — Eng- 
land's true greatness. — Protestantism and 
education. 

Diderot's enthusiasm for the American In- 
surgents: an unpublished letter to Wilkes. 



viii DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

— His wishes for the United States. — 
Conclusion. 

CHAPTER II 

Diderot's English Friends 76 

An enemy: Horace Walpole. — Many Eng- 
lishmen in Paris after 1763. — An anecdote 
by Goldsmith. — Incomplete state of Diderot's 
Correspondence. — A great friend: "Hoop," 
or Hope; his life and character. — Tales of 
savages; Baron Dieskau; anthropology and 
philosophy. — Curiosities of literature: Hoop 
and Sterne ; Smollett's "Roman dinner." — 
Sterne; did he know Diderot personally? — 
Gibbon. — Obscurer visitors to Paris. 

Three famous friends of Diderot: Gar- 
rick; Hume; Wilkes. — Franklin in Paris. 

English reaction against French free-think- 
ing: Burke, Romilly. — The divorce between 
the French and English intellects. 

CHAPTER III 

The Moralist and Philosopher 118 

Diderot "le Philosophe" essentially a mor- 
alist. — Shaftesbury's popularity in England^' 
and France. — His Inquiry concerning merit 
or virtue. — Why Diderot found it especially 
interesting. — Rhetorical precautions. — Eng- 
lish "boldness" tempered in the translation. 
— Shaftesbury's influence on Diderot. — 
Sceptical doubts. 



CONTENTS ix 

Diderot's Pensees philosophiques, partly 
made up of extracts from the Characteris- 
tics. — Reminiscences from Shaftesbury in 
some subsequent works of Diderot. 

The Lettre sur les aveugles and the u prob- 
lem of Molyneux." — Nicholas Saunderson. 
—The fictitious "William Inchliff."— The 
"elephant and tortoise" illustration. — First 
outline of a transformistic theory. — Passage 
from metaphysical to scientific activity. 

CHAPTER IV 
The Scientist 174 

General contempt for "systematic" phi- 
losophy about 1750, — Locke's sensationalism 
almost universally accepted in France. — 
Hume's phenomenism. — Reaction against hy- 
potheses. — Diderot's reserve in judging meta- 
physical systems. 

His work in mathematics and acoustics. — 
Controversy concerning vaccination. — Variety 
of Diderot's scientific studies. 

Diderot's Pensees sur V interpretation de la 
nature and Bacon's Thoughts on the inter- 
pretation of nature. — Some scientific antici- 
pations by Diderot. — Question of patent 
rights in science. 

Diderot as a forerunner of Transf ormism : 
his ideas on this subject in 1749, 1754, and 
1769. — General principles on matter and mo- 
tion, life and consciousness. — Diderot, La- 
marck, Darwin. 



x DLDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

CHAPTER V 

The Encyclopedist 225 

Bacon quoted, on the necessity of " Circle- 
Learning." — Elements for compiling encyclo- 
pedias, provided by the seventeenth century: 
learned periodicals, special reviews, historical 
and technical dictionaries. — An age of dic- 
tionaries. 

John Harris's Lexicum Technicum. — E. 
Chambers's Cyclopcedia. — Their deficiencies. 
— Italian and German compilations ; Brucker. 

Outline of the history of the Encyclopedie. 
— Its originality. — The charge of plagiarism. 
— Influence of Bacon : classification of sci- 
ences ; dignity of the mechanical arts. 

Diderot's contributions to the Encyclopedie : 

Articles on the arts and crafts : some arti- 
cles taken from Chambers. — Mistakes and in- 
accuracies. — His original share: technical 
descriptions. 

Articles on philosophy, often taken from 
Brucker. — His articles on English philosophy. 
— The Annual Eegister and the Zend Avesta. 

Conclusion: what is of lasting interest in 
the Encyclopedie is not borrowed. 

CHAPTER VI 

The Dramatist 287 

Diderot's early taste for the stage. — His 
reaction against the French dramatic tradi- 



CONTENTS xi 

tion. — The importance of action, or "panto- 
mime." — Diderot was writing a play in 1753. 

Diderot's dramatic theories combine the 
French and English movements in reaction 
against French classicism. — Difference be- 
tween these two movements. — English ex- 
amples adduced by Diderot as confirmations 
of his theories. 

Lillo's London Merchant. — Enthusiastically 
praised by Diderot/ — Moore's Gamester. — 
Translated and "improved" by Diderot; 
English " boldness " again corrected. 

Diderot's view of the work of his prede- 
sessors in France and England. — His own 
discovery, the "genre serieux." — His prog- 
eny, the drama. 

The art of acting. — Romantic and realistic 
definition of artistic genius. — Influence of 
Garrick and the Par ado xe sur le comedien. 
— Genius and sensibility. 

CHAPTER VII 

The Novelist 337 

Connection between Diderot's dramatic 
theories and his ideas concerning the novel. 
His ideal, Richardson. — What Diderot ad- 
mired in his works. — The Eloge de Richard- 
son.— Traces of Richardson's influence in 
La Beligieuse. — " Eclaircissements sur les 
obscenites." 



xii DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Sterne. — Vogue of " Shandyism n in 
France. — Tristram Shandy and Jacques le 
Fataliste. — Why Diderot copied some pages 
from Tristram. — Relation of both works to 
Candide. — A philosophic tale on Fatalism. 

Diderot's fondness for the "conte phi- 
losophique." — Consideration of the Supple- 
ment au Voyage de Bougainville in this light. 

CHAPTER VIII 

The Critic 395 

" Fixed faith and constant axioms " in criti- 
cism. — The passage from literary criticism to 
general esthetic criticism before Diderot, in 
France and England. 

Diderot's predecessors in esthetics. — His 
theory of the Beautiful. — Shaftesbury; mo- 
rality and art. — Hogarth's peinture morale. 

English books on art: Hogarth, Spence, 
Webb. — Diderot upbraids Hogarth. — His 
quarrel with Webb: are Christian subjects 
fit for artistic treatment? — Esthetic value of 
" the reigning superstition." — Gothic architec- 
ture. 

The process of the imitation of nature by 
great artists. — Hogarth's " line of beauty." — 
An illustration borrowed from him by Dide- 
rot. — The transcendental model; influence of 
Garrick. 

Romantic themes for poetry. — Philosophy 
adverse to poetry. — Diderot and Shakespeare. 



CONTENTS xiii 

— Scottish poems; Ossian. — Young. — Diderot 
and Dr Johnson. 

Conclusion 446 

Diderot essentially French. — Variety of the 
forms of English " influence " that acted upon 
him. — His gradual emancipation. — How he 
transformed what he received. — Diderot in 
many ways a thinker of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. — Devious ways of his influence in 
Europe. — Why French critics have often dealt 
severely with him. — Multum incola fuit anima 
mea. 

Appendices 463 

I 

A. A letter from Voltaire to G. Keate. 

B. Letters from Diderot to David Hume 
(Reprinted). 

C. An unpublished letter from Diderot to 
Bret. 

D. Letters from Diderot to John Wilkes 
(three unpublished). 

II 

A Chronological Table of Diderot's main 
works. 

Ill 

Bibliographical Note. 



Diderot as a Disciple of English 
Thought 



INTRODUCTION 

" The junction of the French and English 
intellects, which, looking at the immense chain 
of its effects, is by far the most important fact 
in the history of the eighteenth century/' 1 is 
also the most significant and far-reaching move- 
ment in the history of French literature. Until 
that time, England had often looked to France 
for intellectual leadership, more especially after 
the Norman Conquest, during the Renaissance, 
and after the Restoration, while France had 
ignored the thought and art of her northern 
neighbor: but in the eighteenth century, Eng- 
land became the leader, the masters became the 
disciples, and the message they received and 
interpreted was heard by all nations. 

This great intellectual revolution has received 

1 H. T. Buckle, History of English Civilisation, I, 
Chap. 12. 

2 1 



2 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

a great deal of attention since Buckle first em- 
phasized its importance, more than half a cen- 
tury ago. The circumstances by which it was 
brought about, the progress of the English influ- 
ence, and the manner in which it affected the 
most eminent minds in Trance during the philo- 
sophic age, are questions which had been barely 
touched upon by historians of French literature, 
like Villemain and Barante, in the first half of 
the nineteenth century. Within the last sixty 
years they have been brought into clearer light, 
by Buckle himself, in his History of English 
Civilization, and by Lord Morley, in his admir- 
able studies on the French Philosophers, Rous- 
seau (1873), Voltaire (1874), and Diderot and 
the Encyclopedists (1878) ; in France, by 
Joseph Texte, in his work on Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau et les origines du cosmopolitisme 
litteraire (1895), and by M. J. J. Jusserand, 
in his Shakespeare en France sous Vancien 
regime (1898), — two books teeming with in- 
formation for the student of comparative lit- 
erature. 

Eor has the detail of the influences exerted 
in France by English writers, and of the in- 



INTRODUCTION 3 

debtedness of individual French authors to 
English thought, been neglected in the study 
of that great epoch which has been characterized 
as that of the " discovery of England " by the 
French. What M. Jusserand has done for 
Shakespeare, in tracing the rise of his popular- 
ity in France from its obscure beginnings to its 
climax in French Eomanticism, has been done 
by Mr J. M. Telleen for Milton, by M. Leon 
Morel for Thomson, by M. W. Thomas and M. 
F. Baldensperger for Young, 2 while valuable 
studies have been written by M. Huchon on 
Mrs Montagu and by Mr Hedgcock on David 
Garrick in their relation to French society in 
the eighteenth century. 3 Concerning English 
influences on French writers in that age, fewer 
works have appeared. The Abbe J. Dedieu has 
given a comprehensive view of Montesquieu's 
indebtedness to the political tradition of Eng- 

3 J. M. Telleen, Milton dans la litterature frangaise, 
Paris, 1904. — L. Morel, James Thomson, sa vie et ses 
aeuvres, Paris, 1895. — W. Thomas, Le poete Edward 
Young, 1901. — F. Baldensperger, " Young et ses 'Nuits* 
en France,' ' in Etudes d'histoire litteraire, I, 1907. 

* Bene Huchon, Mrs Montagu and her friends, London, 
1906.— F. A. Hedgcock, David Garrick et ses amis fran- 
cais, Paris, 1911, transl. London and N. Y., 1912. 



4 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

land ; on Voltaire, an admirably thorough study 
of the English sources of his Lettres Philoso- 
phiques is to be found in M. Lanson's critical 
edition of that work (Societe des Textes Eran- 
§ais Modernes, Paris, 1909, 2 vols) ; while the 
late Churton Collins, Mr Walter Sichel, and 
several others, have thrown some light on Vol- 
taire's friendship with Bolingbroke and his 
sojourn in England. 4 But it is surprising, 
and much to be regretted, that there is as yet 
no work dealing with the whole subject of the 
relations of Voltaire with English thought. 

The same lack is felt in the case of Diderot, 
who, although he has been called "the most 
German of Frenchmen," is however "full of 
England " in his works. 5 A great deal of atten- 

* Churton Collins, Bolingbroke; Voltaire in England, 
1886; reprinted with additions in Voltaire, Montesquieu 
and Rousseau in England, 1908 1 .— W. Sichel, Bolingbroke 
and his times, 2 vols, 1901. — To which one may add 
Ballantyne, Voltaire's Visit to England, 1893, and two 
articles on the same subject by M. L. Foulet in Bev. 
d'hist. lift., 1906, 1908. 

6 ' \ He has been described by a most consummate judge 
[by Goethe] as the most German of all the French. 
And his style is deeply marked by that want of feeling 
for the exquisite, that dulness of edge, that bluntness of 
stroke, which is the common note of all German litera- 



INTRODUCTION 5 

tion has been devoted by historians of German 
literature to his influence in Germany, particu- 
larly on the drama, through Lessing; and an 
interesting study might yet be written on Di- 
derot and his German friends, and on the 
Germanic features of his genius which made 
him so great in the eyes, not only of Grimm 
and Lessing, but of Schiller and Goethe. The 
Italian Diderot could also be made the subject of 
a curious though less considerable inquiry ; for, 
like Voltaire and many other contemporaries he 
was a good Italian scholar, and his indebtedness 
to Italian literature, after a good deal of con- 

ture, save a little of the very highest' ' (J. Morley, 
Diderot . . ., I, p. 39). 

F. Brunetiere, Manuel de I 'hist, de la litt. frang., 1898, 
p. 321-322 : " . . . On ne trouve rien que d 'anglais dans 
Pceuvre de Phomme que Pon appelle encore souvent le 
'plus allemand' des Francois." — Also, in his Epoques 
du theatre frang.: "On a dit de Diderot qu'il etait 'le 
plus allemand des Francais,' et je crois que Pon s'est 
trompej mais si Pon disait qu'il fut tout anglais, on 
serait assez pres de la verite" (1896, p. 313).-— See also 
F. Loliee, Les litter atures comparees, p. 268: "Chaucer 
est plein de France et d'ltalie, Corneille d'Espagne, 
Shakespeare et Moliere d'ltalie, Diderot d 'Angleterre ' ' ; 
and J. Texte, Etudes de litteratures europeenne, p. 16- 
17: "Si Voltaire doit beaucoup a PAngleterre, Diderot 
lui doit plus encore." 



6 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

troversy, is still to be determined. What has 
been attempted in the present work is a delinea- 
tion of the English aspect of that prolific and 
truly cosmopolitan genius, that is to say a study 
of his life and works with constant reference to 
the various English influences that were brought 
to bear upon them. It need not be said, there- 
fore, that this is not in any way a complete 
presentation of Diderot, his character, his writ- 
ings, and his influence, but only a partial sketch 
of one of the most curious figures in French 
literature, "Diderot the Englishman," and a 
survey of the abundant and varied inspiration 
which he drew from English thought. 

Born in 1713, in the year when the Treaty 
of Utrecht was concluded, at a time when the 
political power of England was decidedly in 
the ascendant, he reached manhood and started 
on an eventful literary career in a decade 
(1733-1743) when England, already embroiled 
in fresh quarrels with France, was becoming an 
object of immense interest for the intellectual 
part of the French nation. This interest, far 
from abating, increased greatly in the following 
twenty years, during that period marked in 



INTRODUCTION 7 

European history by the War of the Austrian 
Succession and the Seven Years' War, which, 
at the Treaty of Paris, in 1763, ended disas- 
trously for France as a world power, by the loss 
of nearly the whole of the first French colonial 
empire. He died in 1784, one year after the 
signing of the Treaty of Versailles: the inde- 
pendence of the United States of America had 
been recognized, the pride of Great Britain 
humbled, and the excellence of her Constitu- 
tion, as well as the wisdom of her policies, 
which Voltaire and Montesquieu had so much 
admired, had for some time become a matter of 
general doubt. 6 

Through all those years, which had seen the 
rise, the glory, and the temporary decline of 
the British power in war and diplomacy, the 

6 The preface for instance of a poem on the Inde- 
pendence of America, L'Amerique Delivree, dedicated to 
John Adams (Amsterdam, 1783, 2 vols), illustrates in a 
curious manner this reaction against ' ' 1 'anglomanie. ' ' 
The author, who signs with the initials L. C. d. 1. G., de- 
clares that "the much vaunted wonder, the British Con- 
stitution, was, just as much as the codes of neighboring 
nations, subject to the convulsions of despotism, the mis- 
deeds of tyranny, and perhaps more favorable to a cor- 
ruption most dangerous to the people whose reins it held 
so clumsily." 



8 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

intellectual influence of England had been 
steadily gaining ground in France, where it 
was to remain the paramount foreign inspira- 
tion for many years to come. The language, 
the literature, the philosophy, the laws, the 
manners of England, which during the reign of 
Louis XIV had been unknown in France, or, 
when known, had been despised, 7 were in the 
eighteenth century studied with the greatest 
eagerness by the French. England was con- 
sidered by them as the land of original thought, 
independent theories, curious observations, 
practical suggestions, new departures in every 
field of intellectual activity. Such a reaction 
was but natural and inevitable after what 
Buckle calls the brilliant and slavish classical 
age of France. 

" For where but in England was a literature 
to be found that could satisfy those bold and 
inquisitive thinkers who arose in France after 
the death of Louis XIV ? In their own country 
there had no doubt been great displays of elo- 
quence, of fine dramas, and of poetry, which, 
though never reaching the highest point of excel- 
7 See on this subject Buckle (vol. I, p. 517), Texte 
(pp. 1-16), M. Jusserand (pp. 89-94), in their works 
noted above. 



INTRODUCTION 9 

lence, is of finished and admirable beauty. But 
it is an unquestionable fact, and one melancholy 
to contemplate, that during the sixty years 
which succeeded the death of Descartes, France 
had not yet possessed a single man who dared to 
think for himself. 8 Metaphysicians, moralists, 
historians, all had become tainted by the servil- 
ity of that bad age. During two generations, 
no Frenchman had been allowed to discuss with 
freedom any question either of politics or of 
religion. The consequence was, that the largest 
intellects, excluded from their legitimate field, 
lost their energy ; the national spirit died away ; 
the very materials and nutriment of thought 
seemed to be wanting. No wonder, then, if the 
great Frenchmen of the eighteenth century 
sought that aliment abroad which they were 
unable to find at home. ~No wonder if they 
turned from their own land, and gazed with 
admiration at the only people who, pushing 
their inquiries into the highest departments, 
had shown the same fearlessness in politics as 
in religion; a people who, having punished 
their kings and controlled their clergy, were 
storing the treasures of their experience in that 
8 An exception might be made for Pascal at least. 
But Buckle evidently had in mind here independent 
rationalistic thought; and it is true that what seeds of 
it Descartes had sown found a good soil only in England 
and the Netherlands. Besides, one knows but too well 
what treatment Jansenism received at the hands of 
Louis XIV. 



10 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

noble literature which never can perish, and of 
which it may be said in sober truth, that it has 
stimulated the intellects of the most distant 



In a comparatively short time the French 
became even more fearless than the English, if 
not in art, at least in philosophy, in religion, 
and finally in the domain of political action, 
eliciting from England itself passionately elo- 
quent protests " in sounds that echo still." 

Diderot, with his enthusiastic nature, was 
strongly predisposed to share that admiration 
for the boldness of English thought which 
through his lifetime was like a contagion in 
France. The universality of his mind, his 
curiosity, his indefatigable activity in the most 
varied fields of science and literature, made 
him the ready disciple of English masters. 
More than Voltaire, Montesquieu and Eousseau, 
he drew examples and lessons from that nation 
which had a reputation for profound thinking, 
independence in words and deeds, and virtue 
both private and public. 

There is some difference, however, in the 

»H. T. Buckle, Hist, of Engl. Civiliz., I, p. 524 (2d 
edit.). 



INTRODUCTION 11 

manner in which England as a nation affected 
the greatest intellects of France in the eight- 
eenth century. The two most conspicuous 
spirits in the earlier half of the philosophic age, 
Voltaire and Montesquieu, can be considered as 
belonging to the upper middle-class, the one 
being issued from the "bourgeoisie," and the 
other, although " noble d'epee," being an eminent 
representative of the "noblesse de robe," that 
is to say, that part of the professional Third 
Estate which had entered the privileged order. 
They had seen the England of 1730, and felt at 
once in sympathy with its manners, its tradi- 
tions, and that political Constitution which had 
been gaining strength and authority under the 
reigns of Queen Anne and the first two Georges. 
They had had intercourse with Englishmen of 
rank or wit; they had directed their attention 
to the economical and political development of 
a country which proved more and more suc- 
cessful as years went by; they had been filled 
with admiration for that nation, " the only one 
on earth which had succeeded in regulating the 
power of kings by resisting it," "the freest 
country in the world, without excepting any 



12 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

republic." 10 That admirably well regulated 
land showed indeed some lack of orthodox dis- 
cipline in religion and philosophy, but neither 
Montesquieu nor Voltaire were inclined to find 
fault with it on that account ; as for its contempt 
for the classical discipline of the rules, while it 
had been the source of many " irregular beau- 
ties" in its literature, it might happily be con- 
sidered (so Voltaire thought) as a thing of 
the past. 

The second generation of French writers who 
became interested in England, and, deriving 
inspirations from its genius, rose to fame after 
1750, are men of an altogether different stamp. 
Diderot and Eousseau, whose friendship, begun 
in 1742, lasted some fifteen years, 11 were both 
thoroughly plebeian, and full of the qualities 
as well as the shortcomings of a popular origin : 
naturally inclined to radicalism in thought, 
and hostile to the spirit of compromise, more 
impatient of limitations on equality than of any 
restraints on liberty, they found little to admire 

10 Voltaire, Lettres philos., VIII (Lanson ed., vol. I, 
p. 89') ; and Montesquieu, Notes sur I 'Angleterre, towards 
the end (1830 edit., vol. VIII, p. 157). 

u J. J. Eousseau, Confessions, Garnier ed., p. 265. 



INTRODUCTION 13 

in a political constitution which seemed to 
have been framed for the exclusive benefit of 
an oligarchy of nobles and " bourgeois." Their 
logical minds, following their proletarian aspira- 
tions, carried them beyond all political systems 
then existing, towards democratic conceptions 
which had not yet been tested by experience. 
In the same way, the comfortable beliefs of 
Deism, the frigid tenets of "natural religion," 
did not hold them long. But, in matters of 
literature, their interest was aroused by Eng- 
lish originality; and that profound, unfeigned 
sympathy developed almost into worship for the 
most sentimental, moral, and realistic novelist of 
England, the plebeian Richardson. 

Only, whereas Eousseau tried to minimize 
his indebtedness to Richardson in the Nouvelle 
Heloise, while indeed he did not owe much to 
Locke in his Emile, or to other English writers 
in the remainder of his works, because he was 
not familiar with English books in the original, 
Diderot lavishly praised his foreign models, 
enjoyed among his contemporaries a reputation 
for English scholarship, and must have read 
almost as abundantly in English as in his 



14 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

native tongue. It is hardly an exaggeration to 
say that he owed more to English than to 
French thought, and that without his early 
knowledge of English, and his acquaintance 
with whatever had been or was being written 
in this language by philosophers, scientists, 
novelists, dramatists, poets, and critics, he could 
not have been the prolific writer, original 
thinker, and powerful leader that he eventually 
became. 

This statement, it is hoped, will be found to 
be borne out by the results of the researches 
embodied in this book. The somewhat frag- 
mentary nature of the subject, which is due 
to the great diversity of Diderot's intellectual 
pursuits, and to the restricted viewpoint from 
which they are here considered, compelled the 
adoption of a very discursive method of investi- 
gation. But we have endeavored to introduce 
some unity in the presentation of the various 
aspects of Diderot's indebtedness to English 
thought by constantly keeping them under one 
view, namely, their relation to Diderot's philo- 
sophic message. This message is, in philosophy 
and art, what has become known in the nine- 



INTEODUCTION 15 

teenth century as Positivism and Kealism, 
respectively. Yet, as these general tendencies, 
in which we now sum up Diderot's intellectual 
personality, were some time in taking shape, 
and did not from the beginning appear fully 
formed in him, since also they were not infre- 
quently subjected by him to cross-examination 
and criticism, it has been easy for those who 
for other reasons do not like him to charge him 
with obscurity and self-contradiction. 

Eeferences made between parentheses in our 
text are to the volumes and pages of the latest 
and most complete edition of Diderot's Works, 
by Messrs J. Assezat and M. Tourneux (20 
vols, Paris, Gamier, 1875-1877), in which the 
classification of our author's writings is made 
according to their matter : Philosophy, Sciences, 
Belles-Lettres, Art Criticism, Encyclopedia, 
Correspondence. Whether we start from the 
chronological or from the methodical order of 
Diderot's productions, our study of his in- 
debtedness to English thinkers falls naturally 
into the following parts: the philosopher and 
moralist, the scientist, the Encyclopedist, the 



16 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

dramatist, the novelist, and the critic. To these 
chapters it would have been idle to prefix a full 
biography. What we know of Diderot's life 
and character, through the Memoirs of him 
written by his daughter, Madame de Vandeul, 
and his disciple, Naigeon, as well as through 
the works of contemporaries, will be found 
excellently expounded in the studies on Diderot 
of Karl Rosenkranz, Lord Morley, and M. 
Ducros. But it has seemed interesting, and 
suited to our purpose, first to trace his general 
relations to English culture in the eighteenth 
century; secondly, to outline his personal con- 
nections with various Englishmen who jour- 
neyed to Paris, and to determine in what man- 
ner he reacted under such individual influences : 
and this is the subject of the first two chapters 
in this book. In our concluding chapter we 
have attempted, in summing up what Diderot 
owed to English philosophy and literature, to 
indicate how the borrowed elements were trans- 
formed by his vigorous, original personality, 
how he contributed to their diffusion in conti- 
nental Europe, and lastly how it came to pass 



INTKODUCTION 17 

that he met with more sympathetic recognition 
in Germany and in England than in his native 
country. 

In the appendices will be found a few unpub- 
lished letters of Diderot, together with one of 
Voltaire, and some letters of Diderot that have 
appeared in print but were not collected in his 
(Euvres Completes; also a chronological table 
of his most important writings, and a bibli- 
ography. 

It is a pleasure for us to return sincere thanks 
here to M. Maurice Tourneux, the editor of 
Diderot's Works and of the Correspondence 
litteraire by Grimm and Diderot, who helped 
us with his advice ; to Professor George Saints- 
bury, of the University of Edinburgh, for his 
kind assistance in having researches made 
among Hume's manuscripts, and to Mr H. W. 
Meikle, Lecturer in Scottish History in the 
same University, for collating Diderot's letters 
to Hume with the originals; to M. L. Keau, 
Director of the Institut Francais de Saint- 
Petersbourg, who obligingly made inquiries for 
us in Petersburg concerning Diderot's library; 
3 



18 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

to our friend and colleague, M. Henri Vigier; 

and to Professors Adolphe Cohn and H. A. 

Todd, of the Department of Romance Languages 

in Columbia University, for many valuable 

suggestions and improvements. 

Normal College, New York, 
March, 1913. 



CHAPTEK I 

DIDEROT'S LIFE AND GENERAL RELATIONSHIP 
TO ENGLAND 

Denis Diderot was born in Langres, in the 
province of Champagne, on October 5, 1713. 
The Diderot family must have been an old one 
in Langres, for its name is a diminutive form 
of the name of Didier, the patron saint of the 
ancient city of the Lingones. Diderot's father, 
Didier Diderot, was a cutler, who seems always 
to have enjoyed the reputation among his neigh- 
bors of a skilled workman and a worthy man, 
and to have deserved the reverent affection of 
his three children. 1 These were Denis, the phi- 
losopher, who was considered more or less as a 
black sheep in the family until he made its 
name famous; his sister, a sensible and merry 
person, " a kind of female Diogenes ; " and the 
brother, the Abbe, succinctly described as "a 
good Christian, and a bad man." 

Young Denis was educated by the Jesuits of 

1 Another child of Didier Diderot, a daughter, entered 
a convent against the will of her family, and died insane. 
19 



20 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

his native town. His family cherished the 
ambition of having him enter the Church and 
succeed to a canonicate which was held by one 
of his uncles. But, as he had no taste for the 
priesthood, his father for a time took him into 
his workshop, in order to hand down to him 
the trade which the Diderots had exercised for 
several generations. Yet cutlery was not, any 
more than the ecclesiastical career, the destined 
vocation of the last of the Diderots. He soon 
dropped the craftman's apron, and returned to 
his books. Then he planned, we are told, to 
run away to Paris: in this he was aided and 
abetted by his Jesuit teachers, who would have 
liked to train the clever youth for their order. 
Diderot, however, like many a poor and intelli- 
gent lad before and since, was more eager to 
improve his opportunities and advance in learn- 
ing as far as he could under the Jesuits, than to 
become a member of their Society. The plot 
was discovered by Diderot the father. He as- 
sented to the boy's desire for more education, 
took him to Paris himself, saw him settled, 
satisfied himself that Denis liked the College 
d'Harcourt and was well thought of by his 
regents, and then went back home. 



DIDEROT'S LIFE 21 

From that day it became probable that Denis 
Diderot would reflect great credit on his family, 
as a lawyer or a Sorbonic divine, or else great 
discredit, as a playwright, an actor perhaps, or 
(worse than all) a philosopher. " The picture 
of the famous man dying of starvation is con- 
stantly placed before the eyes of children by 
sensible fathers. ' Wretched child, what are 
you going to do? You are not sure to attain 
glory, and you rush headlong into poverty.' 
. . . Such words resound again and again in 
our homes, but they scarcely convert any but 
mediocre children; the others let their parents 
talk, and go whither nature calls them" {(Euv., 
II, 378). "Had I lived in Athens, I should 
not have become a Eumolpid, for I have never 
been very powerfully attracted by the service 
of the altars ; but I should have taken the robe 
of Aristotle or Plato, or donned the tunic of 
Diogenes" (111,75). 

As soon as he had completed his course at 
college, Diderot was placed by his father under 
the care of Maitre Clement du His, a gentleman 
from Langres and an attorney in Paris, in 
order to study law. But, just as he had dis- 



22 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

liked theology, so the drudgery of an attorney's 
office proved very uninteresting to him. He 
devoted all his spare time to Latin, Greek, and 
mathematics, which were the foundations of the 
Jesuits' pedagogy, and in which he was already 
proficient. "For several years," he says, "I 
have read a canto of Homer before going to bed, 
as religiously as a good priest recites his brevi- 
ary" (III, 478). His curiosity also turned to 
newer things, for which the traditional system 
of education then prevalent in France made no 
provision: such was the study of Italian and 
English, and probably the rudiments of rational- 
istic philosophy. Later on, when he had an 
opportunity to outline a plan of public edu- 
cation, he emphasized the important part which 
modern languages should play in modern in- 
struction, in words which may be worth repeat- , 
ing to-day : 

"French, Italian, English, German are to- j 
day four languages that are almost essential to 
a man who has enjoyed a liberal education. As 
nations become more and more civilized, the 
number of essential languages will increase ; for 
it is most certain that the arts, sciences, and 



DIDEROT'S LIFE 23 

letters travel, and that it is impossible to fix 
them." Since, however, the language of a nation 
is to be mastered for its past as well as for its 
present riches, the ancient languages were not 
to be discarded. Then, "by degrees, the mass 
of knowledge will become too large for the scope 
of the human mind: confusion and barbarism 
will have their turn. And that is the true key 
to the allegorical fable of the Tower of Babel 
.\ .» (Ill, 422, n.). 

Diderot's ambition was not to become a poly- 
glot, and to spend over the chaff of words the 
valuable years which he wished to devote to 
the grain of things. In the bulk of essential 
knowledge which to enlightened minds seemed 
to grow larger day by day, he had to make a 
choice : he devoted his greatest efforts to acquir- 
ing the mastery of Italian and English, then in 
fashion, " like the pretintailles and the falbalas " 
(IV, 223). Voltaire, in a short piece entitled 
Conseils a un journalist e, 2 wrote in 1737 : "A 
good journalist must know at least Italian and 

'Voltaire, (Euvres, Moland edition, vol. XXII, p. 261. 
(As a rule we have tried to quote titles of books in their 
original form, exception being made only when necessary 
for the sake of clearness.) 



24 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

English. ; for there are many works of genius in 
those languages, and genius can hardly ever be 
translated. Those are, I think, the two lan- 
guages of Europe that are most necessary to a 
Frenchman. The Italians are the first who 
rescued the arts from barbarism; and there is 
so much greatness, so much strength of imagina- 
tion, even in the faults of the English that one 
cannot too urgently advise the study of their 
language." When a choice had to be made 
between Italian and English, the former was 
more generally sacrificed; witness the Abbe Le 
Blanc : " We have lately placed the English lan- 
guage in the rank of the learned languages; 
even the women learn it, and have forsaken 
Italian in order to study the language of that 
philosophic nation. There is no provincial 
Armande or Belise who does not desire to know 
it. 7 ' 3 And the Abbe deplored that "the sex" 

3 Jean Bernard Le Blane (1707-1781), Letter 62, to 
Freret, in his Lettres d'un Frangais (1745), 3 vols; 
translated into English, as "Letters on the English and 
French nations: containing curious and useful observa- 
tions on their constitutions natural and political; nervous 
and humorous descriptions of the virtues, vices, ridicules 
and foibles of the inhabitants; critical remarks on their 
writers; together with moral reflections interspersed 



DIDEROT'S LIFE 25 

should look for edification and entertainment to 
wicked English plays and dry English political 
pamphlets. 

Diderot shared, it is true, a rather common 
belief, that "of all the nations of Europe, the 
French showed the least aptitude to modern 
foreign languages" (II, 317). He was mis- 
taking for natural inability what was only the 
effect of a prolonged national concentration, of 
a culture too exclusively humanistic, and of 
that universal attention which foreign nations 
had for ages given to the French language and 
French civilization. In periods of intellectual 
expansion, the French have learned modern 
languages, whenever it has been necessary or 
worth while for them to do so. In the seven- 
teenth century, polite society in France had 
been well versed in the knowledge of Italian 
and Spanish. We have just seen that English 
and Italian were deemed indispensable to cul- 
tured people in the age of Diderot. And in 
the nineteenth century English and German 

throughout the work" (1747), 2 vols. — The general 
trend of the ll moral reflections' ' is to warn the French 
against excessive enthusiasm for English things. 



26 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

were to become familiar not only to the cosmo- 
politan Madame de Stael, but to a host of poets, 
historians, and philosophers who looked abroad 
for new inspirations, new methods, new systems 
of thought. 

In Diderot's lifetime, German was not yet 
an essential language. Frederick II himself, 
who liked to play the part of a protector of 
science and polite literature, was comparable to 
an Augustus devoid of faith in the resources of 
his native tongue, who looked abroad for Vergils 
and Varros to patronize. 4 Diderot in 1770, at 
the age of fifty-seven, confessed that he did not 
know a word of German (VI, 401). Yet his 
great bosom friend, Frederic-Melchior Grimm, 
was a German, and through him he became 
acquainted, not only with various obscure Ger- 
man visitors to Paris, but with personages of 
importance like the crown princes of Brunswick- 
Wolfenbiittel and of Saxe-Gotha (XI, 382). 

* See the Poesies diverses of the King of Prussia (Ber- 
lin, 1760), a curious production, with its condescendingly 
apologetic preface: 

"Ma Muse tudesque et bizarre, 
Jargonnant un f ran<jais barbare, 
Dit les choses comme elle peut. . . ." 



DIDEBOT'S LIFE 27 

The French language, however, was then suffi- 
cient for all intercourse between Frenchmen 
and Germans, as it is to-day for the relations 
between the French and the nations of Eastern 
Europe and the Levant. Had Diderot lived 
after the age of Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and 
Kant, there is no doubt that his versatile genius 
would have been as greatly interested in their 
writings as they were in his own. Towards the 
middle of the eighteenth century, he needed no 
knowledge of German to read Leibnitz, whose 
works were written in French, or Gessner's 
elegies, to which he listened with sympathetic 
interest as they were orally rendered by his 
friend Huber (VI, 401) ; and withal he knew 
enough Latin and Greek to consult Alsted's 
Encyclopedia, or Brucker's Historia Critica 
Philosophies, or any other of "those Germanic 
compilations, bristling, against all reason and 
taste, with Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Latin, 
which are very big already, are growing bigger 
still, will ever grow bigger, and will be all the 
worse for it" (I, 370). 

English works were more attractive, both in 
form and matter, for Diderot and his contempo- 



28 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

raries. "England/' he wrote, "is the country 
of philosophers, of curious, systematic minds" 
(I, 312). A "philosophic breeze," to use 
D'Argenson's phrase, was blowing from over the 
Channel. 5 Diderot was just twenty years old 
when that breeze first raised a great storm in 
the Parliament of Paris: that judicial body, 
alarmed by the nouveautes anglaises, which 
seriously threatened both Church and State, the 
throne and the altar, sentenced Voltaire's Let- 
tres philosophiques (1734) to be publicly burned 
by the hand of the executioner. 6 We may 
imagine with what feelings the young clerk in 
the office of M. Clement du Ris heard about 
that public execution, if he did not witness it 

5 D 'Argenson, Journal et Memoires, Kathery ed., 1859- 
1867, vol. VI, p. 464 (3 sept. 1751) : "From England a 
philosophic wind of free, anti-monarchic government is 
blowing over to us; it passes into all minds, and it is 
well known that the world is ruled by opinion. Maybe 
that government is already arranged in the people's 
heads, to be put into practice on the first occasion; and 
perhaps the revolution might take place with less opposi- 
tion than one thinks. . . ." 

e The Lettres philosophiques, also known as the Lettres 
anglaises, had been published first in English, in London, 
under the title Letters concerning the English Nation 
(1733). 



DIDEEOT'S LIFE 29 

with his own eyes, as it was performed in state 
on the grand staircase of the Palais de Justice. 
Nothing of course could more effectually adver- 
tise English ideas than those absurd outbreaks 
of a tyrannical spirit. While Voltaire was 
fleeing to the frontiers of France and of the 
duchy of Lorraine for a place of safety, young 
Denis no doubt read the condemned book, and 
found in its deep and witty pages a fuller and 
more vivid picture than France had ever had 
before 7 of that philosophic country across the 
Channel, where people were not persecuted for 
discussing topics of religion and politics ; where 
toleration reigned, and where all men, being 
free, "might go to Heaven by whatever path 
they chose ; " where men with property were 
allowed to participate in the government ; where 
trade was no dishonor, and a rich merchant was 
held to be of more account than a beggared 
nobleman; where men of letters received pen- 
sions or profitable appointments, and great men 

T Concerning the Swiss Beat de Muralt, who visited 
England in 1694-1695, and whose Lettres sur les Anglais 
et les Frangais et sur les voyages (1725) influenced his 
countryman Eousseau more than Diderot, see J. Texte, 
J. J. Eousseau, liv. I, Chap. II, sect. 1. 



30 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

of all kinds, poets, philosophers, and scientists, 
were buried with kings at the expense of the 
nation. 

The " Neophyte " in that formidable party of 
Philosophy, which in France was rising amidst 
persecution, must have realized then that the 
" fashion " of learning English corresponded in 
the French nation to certain greater needs than 
did the study of Italian, Latin, or Greek. 
Thirty years later, in 1763, his own experience 
justified him in repeating, almost in Voltaire's 
own words : 

" There seem to be two countries in Europe 
in which philosophy is cultivated, France and 
England. In England, philosophers are hon- 
ored, respected, they rise to public offices, they 
are buried with the kings. Do we see that Eng- 
land is any the worse for it? In France, war- 
rants are issued against them, they are perse- 
cuted, pelted with pastoral letters, with satires, 
and libels. They however are the men who 
enlighten us and uphold the honor of the nation. 
Am I not right in saying that the French are 
children who throw stones at their masters?" 
(II, 80, n.). 

In the Memoir on Diderot written by Madame 
de Vandeul, his daughter, we can gather little 



DIDEKOT'S LIFE 31 



information about Diderot's life between 1733 
and 1743, when lie was in his twenties. We do 
not know when he left M. Clement's office, to 
I live for years la vie de Boheme — not so gay a 
J life as Henri Miirger has made it — a life of 
j penury and hard work. In those lean years, he 
j studied eagerly, learning everything with equal 
| delight, and giving private lessons for a living. 
It is not too much to allow one whole decade 
for the acquisition of that amazing amount of 
knowledge which stood the future editor of the 
Encyclopedia in good stead, and made him 
a Philosopher, in the earliest and fullest mean- 
ing of the word. Madame de Vandeul, however, 
tells us how in that needy period he wrote, for 
fifty ecus apiece, six sermons for the Jesuit 
missions in Paraguay ; how another time, under 
the pretence of joining a monastic order, he 
obtained large sums of money from a certain 
credulous Frere Ange, which honest Diderot 
the father refunded ; how he gave lessons to such 
pupils only as were worth teaching, giving up 
all those whose dulness did not repay his efforts ; 
with several other curious anecdotes which she 
had heard from her father. 



32 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Eor our present purpose it would be more 
interesting to know how he learned English, to 
what extent he knew it, and what English books 
were his earliest reading. We only know, from 
himself, that he preferred to use an English- 
Latin rather than an English-Erench dictionary, 
because the sense of Latin words is better de- 
termined, less liable to vary with different 
lexicographers, than the sense of the words in 
a modern language. 8 Probably he mostly read 
Locke, Shaftesbury, Newton, Taylor, Rapson, 
Saunderson, works of philosophy and science 
which interested him more, and were, idiomat- 
ically speaking, easier reading than the lighter 
forms of literature. It is evident that for the 
study of English he never had the opportunities 
which Voltaire enjoyed in his younger days. 
His life in a miserable quarter of Paris, his 
needy circumstances, his retired mode of living, 
make a striking contrast with Voltaire's bril- 
liant successes some twenty years before, when, 
not yet thirty years old, he was an idol of the 

8 XIV, 438. Gibbon similarly tells us, in his Memoirs, 
that he learned French and Latin together, one language 
helping the other. 



DIDEROT'S LIFE 33 

public, moved in the aristocratic spheres of 
society, and made friends with the exiled 
Bolingbroke, Lord Stair, and Bishop Atterbury. 
It is furthermore worthy of notice that, 
whereas almost all other great Frenchmen of 
letters in the eighteenth century visited England 
at some time or other in their lives, Diderot 
certainly never crossed the Channel. Voltaire 
was exiled to England (1726-1729), where he 
met with as much honor as he had enjoyed at 
home; Montesquieu travelled through the same 
country about the same time, in the course of his 
tour of Europe (1728-1731) ; and later on, Buf- 
fon, Holbach, and Helvetius, visited the land of 
philosophy, whither Eousseau also journeyed on 
an ill-fated tour. Diderot alone stayed at home, 
and would have stayed there all his life, had not 
gratitude impelled him, when he was sixty years 
old, to undertake a long journey to visit his 
imperial benefactress at Petersburg. While 
the taste for traveling was so prevalent in Eng- 
land that no gentleman was considered really 
well-educated unless he had accomplished the 
" Grand Tour," while the French began to share 
the same desire to look beyond the walls of 
4 



34 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

their metropolis for new ideas and inspirations, 
Diderot still thought that there was no place 
like home. " Traveling is a fine thing ; but a 
man must have lost his father, mother, children, 
and friends, or never have had any, to wander 
by profession over the surface of the globe. 
What would you think," he asked Grimm, " of 
the owner of an immense palace who would 
spend all his life ascending and descending, 
from cellar to attic and from attic to cellar, 
instead of quietly sitting down in the midst of 
his family ? Such is the image of the traveler " 
(XI, 218; XVIII, 490). 

"Hitherto," he again wrote in 1773, after 
reading the account of Bougainville's voyage 
around the world, " the final result of my reflec- 
tions had always been that a man was nowhere 
so comfortable as he is at home, a conclusion 
which I took to be the same for each inhabitant 
of the earth taken singly, a natural result of 
that attraction of the soil, which results from 
the comforts that a man enjoys, and is not cer- 
tain to find elsewhere" (II, 206, 212). 

Besides, had Diderot possessed any fondness 
for traveling, had he been curious to know 



DIDEKOT'S LIFE 35 

more of foreign nations than what he could 
compass from books, in his poor study high 
up in some house along the Rue Mouffetard or 
the Eue Taranne, how could he have afforded 
to indulge a taste that was a great deal more 
expensive in his days than in ours? He had 
no pecuniary competency to fall back upon, no 
resources but his learning and the uncongenial 
labor of tutoring, and, as yet, no illustrious 
friends who might have facilitated his travels 
outside of France. Before his journey to Rus- 
sia, he may indeed have gone for a time as far 
as Dieppe. 9 But information is lacking on this 
head, as on almost everything concerning his 
life between 1733 and 1743. 

At the end of this decade, Diderot married 
Mile Champion, a poor seamstress, and, if we 
may believe a parenthetic confession which he 
makes to Grimm 10 in the Salon of 1767, his 

"From some of his criticisms in the Salons, it seems 
difficult to imagine that he had never seen the sea. 

10 The light tone of the passage on 1 ' ce maudit lien 
conjugal' ' has roused the ire of some earnest critics. 
Compare Thackeray's virulent attack on Sterne, for his 
playful "cegrotus sum de uxore mea." It is a question 
whether, in the estimate of a man's character, so much 
should be made of a sally casually thrown out in a piece 



36 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

marriage influenced and almost determined the 
main directions in the chaotic currents of his 
subsequent literary activities. " The necessities 
of life, which imperiously dispose of us, lead 
astray the talents which they apply to things 
foreign to them, and often degrade the talents 
which chance has employed in the right direc- 
tion. That is one of the drawbacks of society 
for which I know of no remedy." A married 
man cannot follow his personal inclinations, or 
his vocation. "For is a husband, a father, 
allowed to be proud, and to be deaf to the com- 
plaints, blind to the miseries which surround 
him ? I had arrived in Paris. I was about to 
don the fur gown and to settle among the doctors 
in the Sorbonne. I meet on my way a Woman 
of angelic beauty. . . . " We marry, four chil- 
dren are born to us, " and there am I, compelled 
to forsake mathematics, of which I was fond, 
Homer and Vergil whom I always carried about 
in my pocket, the theatre, for which I had some 
inclination; glad enough to undertake the En- 

which it was not the author's desire ever to see published. 
Diderot makes a similar complaint about hia domestic 
life, in a more discreet tone, to Mile Volland, in 1765 
(XIX, 149, 159). 



DIDEBOT'S LIFE 37 

cyclopedie, to which I shall have sacrificed 
twenty-five years of my life" (XI, 265). 

* 
He had to begin with less interesting under- 
takings than the Encyclopedie. As English 
books were in demand and it was comparatively 
easy for a Frenchman who knew English to 
turn his knowledge to some account, Diderot, to 
support his family, readily turned to the re- 
source of writing translations for publishers. 
Many books, from the English language or about 
the English, were put forth to satisfy the general 
curiosity which Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques 
had aroused. The Abbe Prevost, who between 
1733 and 1740 had been publishing a period- 
ical, Le Pour et le Contre, expressly devoted to 
the literary news from England, had now begun 
to translate the novels of Richardson. Other 
abbes, like Desfontaines and Le Blanc, and a 
host of poor hacks, were hard at work along the 
same line. Diderot in 1743 translated Temple 
Stanyan's Grecian History; then, with the 
assistance of two other translators more desti- 
tute even than himself, the huge Medicinal Dic- 
tionary of Dr Robert James, which appeared in 



38 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

French in six volumes in 1746. What merits 
in those works attracted a Parisian publisher's 
attention to them and induced him to venture 
on having them translated, it is now difficult to 
determine. These translations, naturally, have 
not been included in Diderot's works, and it is 
doubtful whether we should have known any- 
thing about them had they not been mentioned 
by Madame de Yandeul. Some parts of Dr 
James's Dictionary later found their place in 
the contributions of Diderot to the Encyclo- 
pedic. The only interest which to-day might 
attach to these translations is, that they might 
enable us to ascertain how accurately, after 
abundant reading, Diderot had acquired the 
English language about the year 1745. 

Having become known among Parisian pub- 
lishers as a man of wide information, something 
of a savant, and an English scholar, Diderot 
received the distinction of being chosen in 1745 
to be the editor of the Encyclopedic. The his- 
tory of that epoch-making work, which had 
originated in a plan of translating into French 
the two volumes of Chambers's Cyclopaedia 
(1728), will be dwelt on at appropriate length 



DIDEROT'S LIFE 39 

in a subsequent chapter. 11 It suffices here to 
say that by 1747 the son of the cutler at Langres 
found himself definitely settled in Paris, and 
starting upon a long and stormy life of literary 
labors. 

This work for the Encyclopedie supplied him 
with what he really needed most, beside his 
daily bread. It gave definiteness of aim to the 
rather exuberant and erratic faculties of his 
mind, and induced some trace of discipline in 
the management of his extraordinarily versatile 
and restless intellect. Too much pity need not 
therefore be wasted on him on account of his 
regrets concerning talents misapplied and natu- 
ral gifts neglected. In a way, it was better for 
him not to have devoted himself entirely to the 
stage ; and, on the other hand, the general trend 
of his philosophy enables us to make a safe sur- 
mise that, had he ever found a place among the 
doctors of theology in the Sorbonne, it would 
not have been for long. The more fully one 
becomes acquainted with Diderot, the stronger 
does the conviction grow that, if no Encyclo- 
pedia had existed before him, one would have 

"Chapter V, The Encyclopedist. 



40 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

had to be invented for him; much as Voltaire 
thought it morally necessary that "If there 
were no God, one would have to be invented." 
Diderot was happily possessed with the active 
curiosity, the catholicity of taste, the unrelent- 
ing energy, and the sociable and patient dispo- 
sition that must go to the making of an Encyclo- 
pedia editor ; and that " rage for study " which, 
as he tells us, characterized him when he was 
thirty years old (XX, 80), had fitted him for 
a task formidable at all times, more formidable 
still when no great modern encyclopedia was 
yet in existence. 

The remainder of Diderot's literary activity, 
outside of the Encyclopedie, is, however, worthy 
of attention. While he was engaged in starting 
this great work, writing its Prospectus (1750), 
and preparing its first two volumes for publica- 
tion (1751-1752), he tried his hand at inde- 
pendent writing, and learned by experience that 
it was, to say the least, a hazardous undertaking. 
He always had a sort of shamefacedness about 
his encyclopedic work, for though he considered 
the Encyclopedie a highly useful undertaking, 
bound to be exceedingly beneficial to man- 



DIDEROT'S LIFE 41 

kind, yet the kind of labor it entailed smacked 
too much of mere compilation to satisfy his 
ambition. Before 1747, he had, as it were, felt 
his way by publishing — in 1745 — a paraphrase 
of Shaftesbury's Essay on Virtue or Merit, with 
all the reserves and rhetorical precautions of a 
man who had "the courage of his opinions and 
the fear of their consequences"; 12 — in 1746, a 
series of Pensees philosophiques which form a 
striking contrast with the prudent orthodoxy of 
the notes subjoined by him to the paraphrase of 
Shaftesbury ;- — in 1748, a merely licentious 
book entitled Les Bijoux Indiscrets, yet inter- 
spersed with a greater number of interesting 
philosophic digressions than most merry tales 
of the same sort. This last " display of intem- 
perate wit that had escaped him," as he pleaded 
later, might have passed unperceived by a 
censorship which, although hostile to the free- 
dom of the press on religious and political 

"This is Brunetiere's characterization of Bayle's and 
Voltaire's attitude. It is not without analogy with the 
mot of the Jesuit Pere Garasse concerning free-thinkers: 
' ' Faggots will always be afraid of fire, ' ' — a natural 
thing, as long as there are stakes burning somewhere 
about. 



42 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

questions, was as a rule a great deal more in- 
dulgent than many modern governments in 
matters affecting moral propriety. But Diderot 
went too far when he boldly expounded the 
plausibility of atheism in his Letter on the Blind, 
for the use of those who see, in 1749. On July 
24, 1749, he was arrested, and, as Voltaire had 
once said of himself, "provided by the king 
with free lodgings in one of his chateaux ; " in 
other words, he was imprisoned at Yincennes 
for an indefinite period of time. On November 
3 of the same year, he was freed, after repeated 
requests to the government from the booksellers, 
his employers, who needed him sorely. Yet he 
could not forbear publishing another Letter, this 
time On the Deaf and Dumb, for the use of those 
who hear and speah (1751) ; but this, as it hap- 
pened, did not involve him in new troubles. 
All the vexations he was to endure henceforth 
were solely connected with the Encyclopedie. 
In 1752, he wrote the third part of an Apology 
for the Abbe de Prades, one of his fellow- 
laborers who had written articles on theology, 
and who, despite all apologies, was condemned 
by the Sorbonne and had to flee to Berlin. In 



DIDEROT'S LIFE 43 

1754, Diderot gave out his Thoughts on the In- 
terpretation of Nature, an homage to Bacon, 
and a proof of the close intellectual intercourse 
in which the French philosopher for some years 
had lived with the author of the Novum Or- 
ganum. 

Those first ten years in the eye of the public 
must have satisfied Diderot's craving for an 
author's fame. After 1755, if we except his 
two attempts in the drama, and in his last years, 
an Essay on the life of Seneca and the reigns 
of Claudius and Nero (1778), he did not pub- 
lish anything beside the bulky volumes of the 
Encyclopedie, the last volume of text appearing 
in 1765, and the last volume of plates in 1772. 
In this period of his life, it was his policy to be 
ignored (III, 379). 

Thus it is that so few of his writings were 
known to his contemporaries. For reasons of 
prudence, and out of contempt for present fame, 
perhaps also because he could not bring him- 
self to finish the various works he began en 
oaguenaudant, Diderot after 1755 was content 
to write for himself and a chosen few. We 
must imagine him as he describes himself in his 



44 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Refutation of Helvetius, at his desk, clad in the t 
old dressing-gown which he has celebrated, 
curtains drawn, lamp lighted, " occupe a decom- 
poser des idees." This is the true Diderot, 
ecco il vero Pulcinella: reading, analyzing all 
sorts of notions, the most trifling as well as the 
most respected, remaking a whole hook by way 
of amending it, challenging dogmatic assertions, 
whether orthodox or revolutionary, writing " the 
diary of his reading," like Montaigne, testing 
theories in the light of free examination, in the 
spirit of Descartes, Bayle, and Locke. This 
Diderot intime enjoyed the rare liberty of 
thinking and writing with absolute freedom, 
more freely than any of his English masters, 
not because wealth or a safe retreat made him 
independent, like Voltaire, but because, not 
caring for publication, he had no reading public 
to humor, and no " consequences " to fear. 

There is good reason to believe that, during 
the very active period of his life which extends 
from 1748 to 1760, while he became famous 
both as the editor of the Encyclopedic and as 
the originator of new dramatic theories, Diderot 



DUXEBOT'S LIFE 45 

knew England mostly through books ; very little, 
if at all, by actual intercourse with English 
people traveling in France. 13 When he met 
some Englishmen later on, in the social circles 
which welcomed them after the Treaty of Paris, 
we are not aware that he was able to converse 
with them in their own language; at any rate, 
in what we know of his correspondence with 
them, he always expressed himself in French. 

It was in 1759 and 1760 that he had the occa- 
sion, apparently for the first time, to obtain 
authentic particulars of the" manners and insti- 
tutions of Great Britain, concerning which he 
had hitherto been content to read the accounts 
given by Muralt, Voltaire, Prevost, and the 
Abbe Le Blanc. The curious interest with 
which he relates to Sophie Volland his conver- 
sations with "father Hoop" a Scotchman, 14 
shows how little he knew about England at that 
time, and how eager he was to know more. 

Hoop was a typical Englishman, according to 

the notions entertained of their neighbors by 

the French about the middle of the eighteenth 

13 See Chapter II, Diderot 's English friends. 
"For more particulars concerning this great friend of 
Diderot, see Chapter II, pp. 86 ff. 



46 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

century. He was grave and taciturn, and suf- 
fered from that peculiar form of melancholy 
which Voltaire in a famous piece, 15 and the 
Abbe Prevost in his novel entitled Cleveland, 
had described as characteristic of the English 
temperament, — spleen. 

"You do not know what spleen is, the Eng- 
lish i vapeurs ' ; I did not know either," Diderot 
writes to Mile Volland (Oct. 31, 1760). "I 
a^ked our Scotchman about it in our last walk, 
and this is what he told me : 

" ' For the last twenty years I have had a more 
or less troublesome feeling of general discom- 
fort; my head is never free. It is so heavy at 
times that it feels like a weight which drags 
me forward, and would carry me out of a 
window into the street, or headlong to the 

"Voltaire, Melanges, Moland edition, vol. XXII, pp. 
21-22. His humorous account of the tragic effects of 
the east wind on the morale of Londoners seems likely 
enough; but the story of the unfortunate Molly leaves 
the reader under a strong impression that Voltaire was 
made, by his English friends, the victim of a hoax which 
he never suspected. 

Prevost, in his Eistoire de Monsieur Cleveland, fils 
naturel de Cromwell (1732-1739), had said of spleen 
that it was "a, kind of delirious frenzy, which is more 
common among the English than among the other nations 
of Europe." The word spleen was entered in the Die- 
tionnaire de VAcademie in 1798. 



! 



DIDEROT'S LIFE 47 

bottom of a river, if I stood on the bank. I 
have gloomy ideas, I am sad and bored; I feel 
uncomfortable everywhere, I wish for nothing, 
I am unable to wish, I try to enjoy myself and 
to be busy, but all in vain ; the mirth of others 
grieves me, I suffer when I hear them laughing 
or talking. Do you know that kind of stupid 
or discontented feeling one has on waking after 
sleeping too long ? That is my usual state ; life 
is distasteful to me; the least changes in the 
atmosphere are to me like violent shocks; I 
cannot remain in one place, but must be going, 
I do not know whither. That is how I have 
gone around the world. I do not sleep well, 
have no appetite, cannot digest; I am com- 
fortable only in a stage-coach. I am just the 
reverse of other people ; 1 dislike what they like, 
I like what they dislike ; there are days when I 
hate the light, at other times it makes me feel 
safe, and if I suddenly entered darkness, I 
should think I was falling into an abyss. My 
nights are disturbed by a thousand weird 
dreams. . . . But/ he added, 'the most annoy- 
ing sensation is to know one's own stupidity, to 
know that you were not born stupid, to wish to 
enjoy your intellect, to endeavor to find amuse- 
ment, enter into conversation, bestir yourself, 
and finally to be overwhelmed by the effort. 
Then it is impossible to depict the mental grief 
you feel at being hopelessly condemned to be 
what you are not. Sir,' he then added with an 



48 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

exclamation that rent my soul, ' I was gay once, 
I used to skim along like you over the earth, I 
enjoyed the sight of a fine day, or a beautiful 
woman, I enjoyed a good book, a pleasant walk, 
agreeable conversation, the spectacle of nature, 
the intercourse of wise men, the comedy of fools : 
I still recollect that happiness; I feel that I 
must give it up. ? 

"Well, with all that, dear friend," Diderot 
goes on to say, " this man is still most agreeable 
to deal with. He has kept I know not what of 
his former gaiety which still comes out in his 
expression. His sadness is pleasantly peculiar, 
and is not sad. He is never worse than when he 
is silent; and so many people would be very 
decent if they were like old Hoop when he is 
bad!" (XVIII, 530). 

A few days before (Oct. 13, 1760), Diderot 
and his Scotchman had talked politics, and Di- 
derot seems to have learned much: "I asked 
him a thousand questions about the English 
Parliament. It is a body composed of some 
^.ye hundred persons. The place where it holds 
its sittings is a vast building ; six or seven years 
ago everybody could be admitted there, and the 
most important affairs of State were discussed 
under the very eyes of the nation assembled and 
sitting in large galleries above the heads of the 



DIDEROT'S LIFE 49 

representatives." (The debates of Parliament 
were then no longer public, for reasons of State. ) 
" Do you think, my friend," Diderot asks with 
naive confidence, "that a man would dare to 
propose a harmful project or oppose a useful 
measure in front of a whole nation, and acknowl- 
edge himself wicked or stupid ? " (XVIII, 488). 
The use of shorthand to record parliamentary 
debates was another foreign wonder to Hol- 
bach's circle, and the philosopher marveled at a 
secret which he thought had been lost since the 
days of Cicero. 

But what about the question of "merit or 
virtue " ? Did the Britons live up to their repu- 
tation in this respect? The Scotchman began 
to dispel Diderot's illusions on this score. 
London society life was less peculiar than Eng- 
lish political life, for it appeared to be much 
like Parisian life in some ways. Diderot told 
amazing stories of the extravagance of "la 
Deschamps," a much talked-of actress ; but they 
were matched by Hoop's recollection of a famous 
Miss Phillips, who showed "un esprit etonnant" 
by practising in a masterly manner the art of 
blackmailing noblemen, as a short and easy 
5 



50 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

way to raise money when she wanted some (Oct. 
28, 1760; XVIII, 526). Yet such examples, 
Hoop adds for the honor of his country, were 
comparatively rare in England. 

Thirteen years later, in his journey through 
Holland, Diderot relieved the tedium of travel 
in a stage-coach by conversing on the same sub- 
ject with an English lady. English manners, 
it appears by her report, were no better than the 
French: the only difference was, that in Paris 
the dangerous moral influence was that of 
women ; in London, it was that of men. Where- 
upon Diderot passes on to a discussion of the 
anatomy and the ethics of the Hottentots, with 
a young Englishman, named Gordon, who had 
visited South Africa. 16 

As he acquired a more substantial and direct 
knowledge of England, after 1760, Diderot lost 
indeed some long cherished notions about Eng- 
lish virtue, for which Shaftesbury was partly 
responsible : but, at the same time, he was filled 
with sympathy and respect for those men who 
had the honor of sharing in the managment 

"Whether this was the "Colonel Gordon" to whom 
Madame Geoffrin refers in her letters to Hume, or some 
other, we have not been able to ascertain. 



DIDEROT'S LIFE 51 

of the public affairs of their country, his " dear 
philosopher" David Hume, secretary of the 
English embassy in Paris, and his "very dear 
and honored Gracchus," John Wilkes. 17 The 
latter excited his enthusiasm, for had he not 
dared to brave his king and make a stand for 
"liberty," — a wonderful example of hardiesse 
anglaise ? While the former gave him occasion 
to wonder when philosophers would be entrusted 
with responsible positions in the French admin- 
istration. The time was near for that honor to 
devolve on a Turgot, a Eecker; but the French 
monarchy was to find then that it was too late. 
The halo of glory which still surrounded the 
parliamentary system of England was beginning 
to be obscured by many shadows in its foreign 
and colonial policy. After 1763, Great Britain 
appeared to Frenchmen as a power which for 
years had been France's relentless enemy on the 
Continent, and her triumphant rival in the 
struggle for colonial expansion. Diderot, while 
unable to sympathize with the exclusive, narrow- 
minded, bitter spirit of so-called patriotism 

17 For more details on the relations of Diderot with 
Hume and Wilkes, see Chapter II. 



52 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

which long-protracted wars had fostered in the 
less enlightened part of the French and the 
English nations, could no longer share that other 
excess, a philosophic kind of cosmopolitanism 
founded on the negation of patriotism, which 
extolled everything connected with England and 
reviled everything French. An undiscerning 
"Anglomania" would have been as unbecom- 
ing to a truly philosophic intellect as that un- 
compromising hatred and contempt of foreign- 
ers which characterized, for instance, a Smollett 
and a Samuel Johnson. 18 

"All nations," he wrote in the Encyclo- 
pedie, 19 "have fairly just ideas to-day concern- 
ing their neighbors, and they consequently have 
less of the fatherland enthusiasm than in the 
ages of ignorance ; there is not much enthusiasm 
when there is much enlightenment ; it is almost 
always the impulse of a soul full rather of pas- 
sion than of knowledge; by comparing in all 

18 He tried to convince the Russian Princess Dashkoff 
that her exclusive feelings of admiration for the English 
blinded her to the merits of the French; but he left to 
his less intelligent disciple Naigeon, by whom the Rus- 
sian Czernischew had already been "trounced' ' (in a 
literary way) for placing England above France, the 
task of upbraiding Helvetius for a similar offence. 

19 Article " Legislateur, ' » CEuv., XV, 434. 



DIDEROT'S LIFE 53 

countries laws with laws, talents with talents, 
manners with manners, nations will find so 
little reason to prefer themselves to others that, 
although they will preserve for their own land 
that love which is the product of personal inter- 
est, they will at least cease to entertain that 
enthusiasm which is the result of exclusive 
esteem." And he proceeds to say, with more 
optimism than true insight : "It would not be pos- 
sible nowadays, through supposititious charges, 
and political tricks, to inspire people with such 
violent forms of national hatred as one formerly 
did; the slanders published by our neighbors 
against us have hardly any effect, except on a 
small, despicable part of the inhabitants of a 
capital [London] which contains the lowest 
kind of rabble as well as the noblest population." 

The fanatic London mobs whose patriotic 
passion could be fanned to fury by the introduc- 
tion of French dancers on Garrick's stage, those 
"true Britons "whose ancient hatred for France 
is displayed in innumerable skits and songs of 
that time, were not without equivalents in Paris. 
Sebastien Mercier, in his Tableau de Paris 
(1781), tells us how gaping audiences, in the 
Jardin du Luxembourg, listened to the ha- 
rangues of a patriotic Abbe, who used to bawl 
repeatedly that if only " thirty thousand men " 



54 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

marched on London the war would soon be at 
an end; and how, in consequence, his admirers 
conferred on him the name of the "Abbe 
Thirty-Thousand-Men." 

That Diderot one day felt ashamed of having 
too highly extolled England during the earlier 
part of his life, is shown by a curious recan- 
tation, in his Second Entretien sur le Fils 
Naturel. In the same passage he illustrates 
the truth that "there are good people every- 
where," and that feelings of kindness and hu- 
manity are not to be claimed as belonging to 
one nation alone, to the exclusion of all others. 
In his play, an old servant, Andre, is supposed 
to have been captured at sea with his master, 
and both had been afterwards despoiled of all 
they had in the English pontoons; but a kind- 
hearted Englishman had eventually obtained 
their freedom and provided them with all they 
wanted : " ]STow," Andre says to Dorval [Diderot] , 
who has alluded to those facts in his domestic 
tragedy, " you are a little too concise about the 
good deeds of the Englishman who succored us. 
Sir, there are honest people everywhere. . . . 
But you are much altered from what you used 



DIDEBOT'S LIFE 55 

to be, if what is also said about you is true." 20 
" And wbat else do people say ? " " That you 
have been madly infatuated with those people." 
" Andre ! " " That you looked upon their coun- 
try as the refuge of liberty, the land of virtue, in- 
vention, originality." "Andre ! " " Now it annoys 
you. Well, let us not talk about it any more " 
(VII, 110). Let us rather talk, he says, of an 
English servant's charity to him, which was as 
worthy to be put on record as the English gen- 
tleman's generosity. 

Several passages in Diderot's Refutation de 
Vouvrage oVHelvetius intitule L' Homme are 
devoted to criticizing the idea that the best 
form of government was the regime of a " good 
tyrant," that is, an unlimited, enlightened 
monarchy. This ideal of a bygone age, which 
Frederick II and Catherine II had been re- 
furbishing of late, and which probably was not 
altogether foreign to the policy of the "royal 
prerogative " pursued by George III with such 
disastrous results, had found defenders in the 
camp of philosophy. Diderot disliked Fred- 
erick, and did not care if he knew it. He had 

20 It has just been said that Darval had become a free- 
thinker. 



56 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

accepted Catherine's protection, but was doomed 
to fail in his futile attempts to advise her and 
win her over to plans of philosophic and truly 
far-sighted reforms for Russia. As for Eng- 
land, ominous signs were already appearing in 
her political sky, and Diderot wrote : " Suppose 
the English had had three successive Elizabeths, 
they would be the lowest slaves in Europe" 
(II, 382). 

Helvetius, who had fled to England when his 
book De VE sprit was condemned in France, had 
been handsomely treated in London. Naturally, 
he had come back as pleased with England and 
as dissatisfied with France as Voltaire in 1729. 
" Poor Helvetius," said Holbach, " he has seen 
nothing else in England than the persecution of 
his book in France." Now Holbach, who was 
one of Diderot's great friends, and who had 
entertained most of the distinguished English 
visitors who had come to the French capital 
after the Treaty of Paris, went to England in 
his turn in 1765. But he brought back the most 
unfavorable impressions of the aspect of the 
country, its climate, its wealth, and the pro- 
verbial tristesse of its inhabitants. Diderot 



DIDEEOT'S LIFE 57 

summed up those impressions for his friend 
Sophie Volland (Sept. 20, 1765) with the faith- 
ful accuracy of one who has learnt something 
new and well worth recording : 

" The Baron has returned from England : he 
had gone to that country favorably prejudiced; 
there he has met with the pleasantest reception, 
enjoyed the best of health, and yet he has come 
back dissatisfied; dissatisfied with the country, 
which he does not think so thickly populated 
nor so well tilled as people said; dissatisfied 
with the buildings, in which the affectation of 
imitating nature is worse than the monotonous 
symmetry of art ; dissatisfied with a taste which 
piles up in palaces the excellent, the good, the 
bad, the detestable, all pell mell; dissatisfied 
with the amusements, which look like religious 
ceremonies; dissatisfied with the people, on 
whose faces one never sees confidence, friend- 
ship, mirth, sociability, but which all bear this 
inscription: What is there in common between 
you and me? — dissatisfied with the great, who 
are sullen, cold, haughty, disdainful and vain, 
and the lowly, who are harsh, insolent, and 
barbaric; dissatisfied with the dinners between 
friends where each one takes his place according 
to his rank, and where formality and ceremony 
sit by the side of each guest; dissatisfied with 
the meals at inns where one is well and quickly 
served, but without any affability. I heard him 



58 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

praise nothing but the conveniences for travel- 
ing; he says that there is not one village, not 
even on a by-road, where you would not find 
four or &ve post-chaises and twenty horses ready 
to start. He traveled through the whole prov- 
ince of Kent, one of the most fertile in Eng- 
land; he claims that it is not to be compared 
with our province of Flanders. In that English 
trip he has been filled anew with fondness for 
living in France. He confessed to us that every 
moment he found himself saying in his inner- 
most heart: { Paris, when shall I see thee 
again? O French people, indeed you are very 
light and giddy, but you are a hundred times 
better than these morose, sad thinkers over 
here.' He claims that only in France do people 
drink Champagne wine, that only here people 
are gay, full of laughter and self -enjoyment" 
(XIX, 179). 

These regretful longings for Paris were not 
unusual, and were indulged in even by many 
Englishmen, at a time when the attraction of 
Paris was greater than it has ever been. In the 
preceding year, for instance, Lord Holdernesse 
similarly wrote to David Hume : " . . . There is 
something in the plan of society in France so 
entirely adapted to my taste, that I must feel 
the want of it. Here, my pleasure is retreat 



DIDEROT'S LIFE 59 

and contemplation; there 'twas company and 
conversation. I suppose there is something in 
our natural as well as political constitution, that 
renders the ease of life, which is so universal in 
France, difficult, if not impossible here. In 
most respects, the English seem fit for society. 
They are naturally good-natured, and commonly 
not ignorant; and the many easy fortunes 
amongs us ought to facilitate our communica- 
tion with each other; instead of which chacun 
boude chez soi." 21 

Concerning the economical, political, educa- 
tional and social conditions in England, Holbach 
was even less enthusiastic than about the Eng- 
lish climate and temperament : 

" Do not believe/' Diderot writes to Mile Vol- 
land (Oct. 6, 1765), "that the repartition of 
wealth is unequal in France only. There are 
two hundred English lords who have each an 
income of six, seven, eight, nine, up to eighteen 
hundred thousand livres; there is a numerous 
clergy which owns, as ours does, one quarter of 
the property in the State, but it contributes in 
al In J. H. Burton, Letters of Eminent Persons ad- 
dressed to D. Hume, 1849, p. 72. — Lord Marishal, also 
writing to Hume (Oct. 28, 1763), thinks Paris a more 
comfortable place than Edinburgh for thinking freely. 



60 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

proportion to the public charges, while ours 
does not; there are merchants who are extrava- 
gantly wealthy; you may imagine how little is 
left for the other citizens. The monarch seems 
to have his hands free to do good and bound for 
evil ; but he is as much the master of everything 
as any sovereign, and more. Elsewhere the 
court commands, and is obeyed. There, it cor- 
rupts and does what it pleases, and the corrup- 
tion of the subjects is perhaps worse, in the long 
run, than tyranny. 22 There is no public edu- 
cation. The colleges, sumptuous buildings, 
palaces which might be compared with our 
Chateau des Tuileries, are occupied by rich, 
lazy fellows who sleep and get drunk through 
a part of the day, and spend the other part 
knocking into shape a few apprentices to the 
ministry. The gold which abundantly flows 
into the capital from the provinces and all the 
lands of the earth raises wages to an exorbitant 
level, encourages smuggling, and causes the 
manufactures to decay. Whether it be an effect 
of the climate, or of the use of beer and strong 
spirits, of coarse meat, of everlasting fogs, of 
the coal smoke by which they are always en- 

22 Montesquieu, in his Notes on England, mentions this 
tradition of political corruption. — See to the same effect 
D'Argenson, Journal et Memoir es, Rathery edit,, vol. 5, 
p. 89 (Oct., 1747): "[The English], with their greed 
and their fondness for opposing their own government, 
yet are duped by a king who distorts their Constitution 
by bribing the deputies of the government. ' ' 



DIDEROT'S LIFE 61 

shrouded, these people are sad and melancholy. 
Their gardens are cut with winding, narrow 
paths ; everywhere you are made to feel that the 
host hides himself and wishes to be alone. 
There you find a Gothic temple; elsewhere a 
grotto, a Chinese hut, ruins, obelisks, caves, 
tombs. A private man of wealth has had a 
large space planted with cypresses ; among those 
trees he has scattered busts of philosophers, 
funeral urns, antique marbles, on which one 
reads: Diis Manibus, 'To the Manes.' What 
the Baron calls a Eoman cemetery, that gentle- 
man calls the Elysium. But what above all 
characterizes that national melancholy, is their 
behavior in those immense, sumptuous buildings 
which they have erected to Pleasure. 23 There 
you could hear the trotting of a mouse. A hun- 
dred women, erect and silent, walk there around 
an orchestra built in the middle, where the most 
delightful music is played. The Baron com- 
pares those rounds to the seven processions of 
the Egyptians around the mausoleum of Osiris. 
They have public gardens that are not much 
frequented; on the other hand, the people are 
not more densely crowded in the streets than 
in Westminster, a famous abbey adorned with 
the funeral monuments of all the great men of 
the country. A charming mot of my friend 
Garrick is, that London is good for- the English, 
but Paris is good for everybody. When the 
a Vauxhall, etc. 



62 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Baron called on that famous player, the latter 
led him by an underground passage to the end 
of an island watered by the Thames. There he 
found a cupola raised on columns of black 
marble, and, under that cupola, in white marble, 
the statue of Shakespeare. l There,' said Gar- 
rick to him, ' is the tribute of gratefulness which 
I owe to the man who has made my reputation, 
my fortune, and my talent.' 

"The Englishman is a gambler; he stakes 
frightful sums of money. He plays without 
speaking, loses without complaining, wastes in 
one instant all his resources; nothing is more 
common there than to find a man, not more than 
thirty years old, who has become insensible to 
riches, the table, women, study, even philan- 
throphy. Enrmi seizes them in the midst of 
pleasures, and leads them into the Thames, 
unless they prefer to take the muzzle of a pistol 
between their teeth. In a remote spot of St. 
James' Park, there is a pool reserved for women 
by an exclusive privilege : that is where they go 
to drown themselves. Listen to a fact, which 
might well fill with sadness a sensitive soul. 
The Baron was taken to the house of a charming 
man, full of kindness and courtesy, affable, 
learned, wealthy, and honored; that man ap- 
peared to him to be after his own heart, and 
the closest friendship sprang up between them ; 
they lived together, and parted with grief. The 
Baron came back to France; his first care was 
to thank the Englishman for the manner in 



DIDEKOT'S LIFE 63 

which he had been received at his house, and to 
repeat the feelings of attachment and esteem 
which he had vowed for him. His letter was 
half written when he heard that, two days after 
his departure from London, that man had blown 
out his brains with a pistol. What is most 
peculiar, however, is that this weariness of life 
which takes them from country to country does 
not leave them, and that often an English- 
man who travels is simply a man who leaves 
his country to go and kill himself elsewhere " 
(XIX, 182 ff.). 

This propensity of the English to suicide, 
which some of their writers acknowledged as a 
national characteristic, 24 had just been illus- 
trated by the case of an Englishman who, after 
an unsuccessful attempt to drown himself in 
the Seine, had given a great deal of trouble to 
the English Embassy in the matter of his rescue 
from the French law: Hume, as secretary of 

21 Bichardson 's Pamela (Leslie Stephen edit., vol. Ill, 
p. 101), in her criticism of The Distrest Mother, Phillips's 
translation of Bacine's Andromoque, deplores the im- 
moral example given by a tragic heroine, Hermione, to 
"such a gloomy, saturnine nation as ours, where self- 
muTders are more frequent than in all the Christian world 
besides." — In the Encyclopedic, article " Suicide' ' 
((Euv., XVII, 234-237), Diderot discusses English 
authorities on the subject, among others Dr. Donne's 
piad&varos (1700). 



64 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

the Embassy, " had been obliged to call twenty 
times on the Premier President before he could 
make him understand that there was no stipu- 
lation, in any of the treaties between Prance 
and England, forbidding an Englishman to 
drown himself in the Seine under penalty of 
hanging" (XIX, 184). 

" The English have, like ourselves, a mania 
for converting people," Diderot goes on; and 
he introduces several stories about missionaries 
and savages, one of which he had heard from 
Hume, all tending to show what a ludicrous 
construction is apt to be put on some Christian 
doctrine or sacrament by Cannibal or Huron 
converts. And yet, in spite of the missionary 
zeal which had inspired the foundation of the 
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 25 
"the Christian religion is almost extinct in 
England. The Deists there are without num- 
ber; there are hardly any atheists; those who 
are such conceal the fact. ' Atheist ' and ' crim- 
inal' are for them almost synonymous terms" 
(XIX, 185). Paris evidently contained at that 

25 Noticed by Diderot, after Chambers, in the Encyclo- 
pedia: see Chapter V, The Encyclopedist. 



DIDEEOT'S LIFE 65 

time fewer deists than England, and more 
atheists, who did not take much trouble to hide 
their creed: Hume soon found this out at the 
dinners of Baron d'Holbach. Diderot con- 
cludes : 

" A nation which thinks that good people are 
produced by believing in a God, and not through 
sound laws, does not seem to me very far ad- 
vanced. I think of the existence of God, in 
relation to a nation, as I do of marriage. The 
latter as an institution, the former as a notion, 
are excellent for three or four persons of sound 
intellect, but fatal to the common run of men. 
The vow of indissoluble marriage makes, and is 
bound to make, almost as many wretches as 
there are married people. The belief in a God 
makes, and is bound to make, almost as many 
fanatics as there are believers. Wherever a 
God is admitted, there is worship; wherever 
there is worship, the natural order of moral 
duties is subverted, and ethics corrupted. 
Sooner or later, a moment comes when the 
notion which had prevented a man from steal- 
ing a shilling will cause a hundred thousand 
men to be slaughtered. Fine compensation ! " 

Whose authority was Diderot inclined to accept, 
the pessimistic views of Holbach, or the enthu- 
siastic encomiums of England by Helvetius? 
6 



66 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Helvetius, we are told (XIX, 187), was madly 
enthusiastic over England, even before he had 
visited it. Later on, at a time when the prestige 
of England as an admirably well-governed coun- 
try was fast waning in the minds of his contem- 
poraries, when her difficulties with her American 
colonies were increasing, and had begun to 
darken the glory so lately acquired by the 
Treaty of Paris (1763), Helvetius had written 
in his book On Man (1772) : 

"To what cause should one ascribe the ex- 
treme power of England ? — To her government." 

And to this Diderot retorted (Refutation of 
Helvetius s booh "On Man" 1773-1774) : 

"But to what cause should one ascribe the 
poverty of Scotland and Ireland, and the ab- 
surdity of the present war against the colonies ? 
To the greed of the merchants in the metropolis. 
— People praise that nation for its patriotism. 
I challenge anyone to show me, in ancient or 
modern history, an example of such national 
selfishness, or of more marked anti-patriotism. 
— I imagine this people under the emblem of 
a robust child, born with four arms, in whom 
one arm tears off the other three." 

Another blot in the scutcheon of England, 



DIDEBOT'S LIFE 67 

according to him, was the peculiarly cruel treat- 
ment which negro slaves suffered in the British 
colonies. 

Yet while he freely criticized the policies of 
England and was siding with Burke, Wilkes 
and other " friends of liberty " on the question 
of the American colonies, Diderot paid a glow- 
ing tribute to the part played by England, and 
generally by the countries of Europe in which 
the Beformation had prevailed, in the emancipa- 
tion and the enlightening of the intellect of man. 
In his Essai sur les etudes en Russie, in which 
he gave the first outline of the Plan d'une Uni- 
versite pour le Gouvernement de Russie (1775) 
which Catherine II had asked him to write, he 
said: 

"When we glance over the progress of the 
human mind since the invention of the art of 
printing, after that long succession of centuries 
during which it had remained buried in the 
profoundest darkness, we notice at once that, 
after the revival of letters in Italy, it was in the 
Protestant countries that the best schools were 
established, rather than in the lands which have 
preserved the Boman religion, and that to this 
day those schools have made the most remark- 
able progress. I shall not enlarge upon this 



68 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

assertion in order to prove it, but it will suffice 
to observe that the spirit of the Catholic clergy, 
which in all times has secured control of public 
education, is entirely opposed to the progress of 
enlightenment and reason, while everything 
favors it in Protestant countries, and that the 
question here is not whether in Catholic coun- 
tries there have not been some very great men 
since the Eenascence of letters, but whether the 
majority, the main body of each nation, has 
become more enlightened and sensible : for it is 
the privilege of a minority of great minds not 
to resemble their age, and nothing in their case 
can be accepted as the rule. Now we see that, 
since the time of the Reformation, all Protes- 
tant countries have made a rapid advance toward 
a better order, that the absurdities and preju- 
dices contrary to good sense have noticeably 
diminished there, and that there is not one 
among them which is not more flourishing than 
any Catholic country that we may compare with 
it, in proportion respectively to their advantages 
and the condition in which each ought to be. 
We may even add that the Catholic lands have 
profited by the light reflected on them from 
Protestant countries ; that the disappearance of 
prejudice, buried by reason in the lands where 
an ambitious clergy no longer had any interest 
or credit to uphold it, has brought about the 
shame and finally the ruin of the same prejudice 
in the neighboring country, to the greatest dis- 
pleasure of the priests. To all those who have 






DIDEKOT'S LIFE 69 

eyes, it is clear that, without the English, reason 
and philosophy would still be in the most con- 
temptible infancy in France, and that their 
true originators among us, Montesquieu and 
Voltaire, have been the disciples and followers 
of the philosophers and great men of England. 26 
It is therefore in Protestant countries that we 
must look for the best and wisest institutions 
for the instruction of youth" (III, 415). 

Thus, in the last decade of his life, Diderot 

still entertained feelings akin to veneration for 

the English masters of French thought, while, 

in relation to the contemporary social, political, 

and even cultural condition of England, he had 

reached a state of comparative scepticism. He 

readily fell in with the great enthusiasm which 

the revolt of the American colonies elicited in 

France ; he was aflame with the same idealistic, 

philosophic love of liberty which inspired a 

Lafayette, and for once he must have felt in 

28 In 1760, Voltaire wrote to the same effect to G. 
Keate: "... I am confident nobody in the world looks 
with a greater veneration [than I do] on your good 
philosophers, on the crowd of your good authors, and 
I am these thirty years the disciple of your way of 
thinking. ,, — This letter, written in English, has not 
hitherto been included in Voltaire's Works; it will be 
found in Appendix I. 



70 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

sympathy with the action of the French mon- 
archy. The utterances of his friend Wilkes in 
the English Parliament further confirmed his 
sympathy for the Insurgents; and so we find 
him, some two weeks before the signing of the 
Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, 
sending to Wilkes his first and only attempt in 
political oratory: 27 

"Friend Wilkes, what are you doing? If 
you are resting, you are much to be pitied. I 
have read with great satisfaction the various 
speeches which you have made, on the affair of 
the [American] provincials. I have found 
them full of eloquence, dignity, and strength. 
I have also made one, and here it is : * Gentlemen, 
I shall not speak to you upon the justice or in- 
justice of your conduct. I am well aware that 
those words are but empty sounds, when the 
common interest is at stake. I might speak to 
you about your means for success, and ask you 
whether you are strong enough to play the part 
of oppressors ; that might be a little nearer the 
question. However, I shall do nothing of the 
sort. But I shall be content merely to beseech 
you to cast a glance at the nations which hate 
you ; ask them what they think of you, and tell 
me until what time you have resolved to make 

27 For the following unpublished letter of Diderot, see 
also Appendix I. 



DIDEROT'S LIFE 71 

jour enemies laugh.' A paper is being pub- 
lished here, which is said to be by a man of 
importance in your country ; from that paper it 
appears that the secret plan of the mother- 
country is to butcher one half of the colonists, 
and reduce the others to the condition of the 
negroes. In fact, that would raise every diffi- 
culty for the present and the future." 

When the success of the American Revolution 
was assured, Diderot, two years before his death, 
hailed the young republic in glowing terms, in 
a half-didactic, half-prophetic page, which one 
might consider as the message of pre-revolution- 
ary France to the newly-born United States, and 
the testament of eighteenth-century philosophy 
to all democratic governments in the future : 

"After centuries of general oppression, may 
the revolution which has just taken place beyond 
the seas, by offering to all the inhabitants of 
Europe a shelter against fanaticism and tyranny, 
instruct those who govern men on the legitimate 
use of their authority ! 

" May those brave Americans, who have pre- 
ferred to see their wives outraged, their chil- 
dren throttled, their dwellings destroyed, their 
fields laid waste, their cities burned, to shed 
their blood and die, rather than to lose the least 
part of their freedom, prevent the enormous 
increase and unequal distribution of wealth, 



72 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

luxury, idleness, the corruption of morals, and 
provide for the preservation of their liberty and 
the duration of their government! May they 
postpone, at least for a few centuries, the decree 
pronounced against all things in this world, a 
decree which has doomed them to have their 
birth, their time of vigor, their decline, and 
their end! May the earth swallow up that 
province of theirs which might one day prove 
powerful and insensate enough to look for the 
means of subjugating the others! In each of 
them, may the citizen either never be born, or 
die at once by the executioner's sword or the 
dagger of a Brutus, who might be powerful 
enough one day, and hostile enough to his own 
happiness, to frame the design of making him- 
self its master ! 

" Let them remember that the public good is 
never accomplished but by necessity, and that 
the fatal time for governments is that of pros- 
perity, not that of adversity. 

" Let men read in the first paragraph of their 
annals: ' People of Northern America, remem- 
ber for ever that the power from which your 
fathers made you free, a ruler of seas and lands 
but a short time before, was brought to the verge 
of ruin by the abuse of prosperity.' 

"Adversity keeps great talents busy; pros- 
perity makes them useless, and brings to the 
foremost positions the incapable, the corrupt 
rich, and the wicked. 



DEDEROT'S LIFE 73 

"Let them bear in mind that virtue often 
hatches the germ of tyranny. 

" If the great man is for a long time at the 
head of affairs, he there becomes a despot. If 
he is there a short time, the administration is 
relaxed and languishes under a succession of 
mediocre administrators. 

" Let them bear in mind that it is neither by 
gold, nor even by the multitude of arms, that a 
State is upheld, but by morals. 

" A thousand men who fear not for their lives 
are more to be dreaded than ten thousand who 
fear for their fortunes. 

" Let every one of them have in his house, at 
the end of his field, by his loom, by his plough, 
his gun, his sword, and his bayonet. 

" Let them all be soldiers. 

"Let them bear in mind that if, in circum- 
stances which allow of deliberation, the advice 
of old men is the best, in moments of crisis, 
youth is commonly better advised than old 
age" 28 (111,324-325). 

To sum up, Diderot's estimation of England 
was never founded on experience, but on second- 
hand information which he derived from books, 
and later from his conversations with English 
visitors in Paris and the impressions of French 

28 The Essay on the reigns of Claudius and Nero, from 
which this passage is extracted, was written in 1778, 
revised in 1782. 



74 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

friends returning from London. Nevertheless, 
he accurately represents the attitude of the 
enlightened part of French opinion concerning 
England between 1740 and 1784. At first, he 
shared the unrestricted admiration of Voltaire, 
the Voltaire of the Letters concerning the Eng- 
lish nation, for " the shelter of liberty, the land 
of virtue, invention, originality." Then, he 
grew ashamed of his infatuation, and, as social 
England lost its glamor in his eyes, and political 
England appeared tainted with corruption at 
home and a tyrannical selfishness abroad, he 
began to revise his early notions concerning that 
country. Finally, in the light of the world 
events which in 1783 culminated in England's 
defeat and the condemnation of a policy which 
had made too light of the right of men to 
liberty and self-government, he greeted in the 
American commonwealth the democracies of the 
future as he dreamed they should be. JBut to 
the end he discerned the true greatness of 
eighteenth-century England, more lasting than 
economic prosperity and supremacy on land and 
sea: he remained true to his admiration for 
England as a great intellectual power to which 



DIDEROT'S LIFE 75 

France owed much ; for English philosophy and 
literature; for the spirit of toleration and of 
free inquiry, unhampered by authority, whether 
spiritual or temporal, for which France was 
still longing. Indeed, a religious reaction had 
set in against freethinking in England since the 
advent of Methodism, about 1740; and the 
spirit of a Samuel Johnson, for instance, was 
in singular contrast with that of a David Hume : 
orthodoxy seemed to prevail, in public opinion, 
over Deism. But Diderot continued to cherish 
the Land of Philosophy which had given birth 
to Bacon, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hume; and 
this sympathetic feeling was fostered in him by 
his intercourse with his English friends. 



CHAPTEK II 

DIDEROT'S ENGLISH FRIENDS 

In a letter to Sir Horace Mann, in 1764, 
Horace Walpole derided the innocent mania of 
some French visitors who believed in la solidite, 
la vertu, la profondeur anglaises, and who had 
evidently been more puzzled than charmed by 
the "Gothick" style of his mansion at Straw- 
berry Hill. "Is it not amazing," he went on, 
"that the most sensible people in France can 
never help being domineered by sounds and 
general ideas? Now everybody must be a 
geometre, now a philosophe, and the moment 
they are either, they are to take up a character 
and advertise it: as if one could not study 
geometry for one's amusement or for its utility, 
but one must be a geometrician at table, or at 
a visit." 1 

One almost shudders to think of what must 
have happened when this fastidious virtuoso 

1 H. Walpole, Letters, ed. by Mrs Paget Toynbee 
(1903-1905), VI, 162 (December 20, 1764). 
76 



DIDEROT'S ENGLISH EMENDS 77 

was introduced, probably in the salon of 
Madame du Deffand, to "notre illustre ge- 
ometre" D'Alembert, and to "le philosophe" 
Diderot. His aristocratic aloofness of manner 
and bis sarcastic wit were evidently perceived 
by tbe kind-hearted, enthusiastic editor of the 
Encyclopedic, who was innocently proud of " an 
honorable title 2 which he held from a few in- 
dulgent friends, and which, when restricted to 
its etymology, might fit him as well as any good 
man" (XII, 175). 

Horace Walpole, who was in Paris in 1765 
and 1766, enjoys the distinction of being the 
only Englishman whom Diderot disliked when 
he met him, and for whom he had no good word 
to say. Let this be our reason, or rather our 
excuse, for disposing of him before we proceed 
to speak of the Englishmen who were Diderot's 
"friends" in a less Pickwickian sense. The 
supercilious humor of the dilettante of Straw- 
berry Hill was bound to clash with the plebeian 
good sense and the somewhat rustic manners of 
"Denis le Philosophe." In Walpole's volumi- 
nous Correspondence, Diderot and D'Alembert 
2 The title of " Philosopher, » ' or "friend of wisdom." 



78 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

are never mentioned without a sneer and a 
scornful reference to their gratefulness towards 
Catherine II. 3 In the letter quoted above, Wal- 
pole refers to Richardson's novels, for which 
Diderot entertained an intense admiration, as 
"most woeful," "deplorably tedious lamenta- 
tions . . . which are pictures of high life as 
conceived by a bookseller, and romances as they 
would be spiritualized by a Methodist teacher ; " 
while elsewhere he ridicules Sterne's manner of 
writing, which at that time Diderot was prob- 
ably engaged in imitating. Walpole had some 
affinities with people of the world, persons of 
wit and intellect, like Voltaire (though he quar- 
relled with him), or old Madame Du Deffand, 
with whom he entertained a famous friendship. 
But the sentimental, moralizing Diderot, whose 
manners were not "genteel" enough to suit 
even Madame Geoffrin, 4 Diderot with his eccen- 
tric fits of enthusiasm, his lack of humor and 
social refinement, must have affected him as a 
kind of infidel Richardson. 

3 H. Walpole, Letters, VII, 369; XI, 58, 163; XII, 
39, 100. 
*De Segur, Le royaume de la Bue Saint-HonorS, p. 315. 



DIDEROT'S ENGLISH FKIENDS 79 

As Diderot's letters after 1765 are compara- 
tively few and cover fragmentary periods, we 
have no other record of the personal relations 
of these two men than an anecdote of a later 
date, to be found in Diderot's short Memoir 
Sur la Princesse Dashkoff (XVII, 491). The 
incident took place in 1770 at the house of the 
Eussian princess, in Paris: 

" Secretary Walpole 5 having very inconsider- 
ately spoken of my country, I thought I should 
not suffer it; and I induced Mr Walpole to 
offer apologies to me, and he assured me that he 
had not thought that he was talking in the pres- 
ence of a Frenchman. I pointed out to him that 
a man should not have two ways of speaking, 
one for the people present, and another for the 
absent ; and I vowed that whatever I might have 
to say about him after he had left, I would have 
5 H. Walpole wrote, before going to Paris (April 9, 
1764; VI, 47) : "I am going to realize the very low ideas 
I have of modern Prance, by a journey to Paris." 
After arriving there, he complained that he was losing 
all his mirth (Oct. 19, 1765; VI, 332) : " Laughing is as 
much out of fashion as pantins or bilboquets. Good 
folks, they have no time to laugh. There is a God and 
the king to be pulled down first; and men and women, 
one and all, are devoutly employed in the demolition. 
They think me quite profane, for having any belief 
left ; ' ' etc. — For his estimate of the philosophers, see 
his letter to Hume, Nov. 11, 1766 (VII, 70). 



80 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

the courage to say to himself. Walpole went 
away; Princess Dashkof? praised my conduct, 
adding that, had she been in my place when ' the 
Walpole' had had the meanness to apologize 
because he did not think me Trench, she would 
not have answered one word, but turned her 
back on him with contempt; and I think she 
was right." 

But that rather despicable parodist, who soon 
acquired an unenviable celebrity in Parisian 
society by his heartless practical joke on perse- 
cuted Rousseau, 6 was happily not the first nor 
the only Englishman of note who visited Paris 
at that time. The conclusion of the peace in 
1763 brought about a veritable exodus of dis- 
tinguished English people from England into 
France; it was as if the English had never so 
fully realised how much they needed an occa- 
sional breath of the Parisian atmosphere as 
during the Seven Years' War. During the lull 
of hostilities that had taken place between the 

6 It is well known that lie wrote the supposed Letter of 
the King of Prussia to Jean-Jacques, which helped to 
further unbalance Eousseau's mind. He was rather 
proud of his performance (see Letters, VI, 396, 401, 
etc.), and could not understand the indignation which 
his meanness aroused in Madame de Boufflers, the Prince 
de Conti, Hume, and Turgot. 



DIDEROT'S ENGLISH FRIENDS 81 

end of the War of the Austrian Succession 
(1748) and the beginning of the Seven Years' 
War (1756), Diderot had not had many chances 
to meet visitors from the "Philosophic Coun- 
try." In 1763, however, at a time when the 
Encyclopedic was almost completed, when he 
was so famous throughout Europe that the em- 
press of Kussia, in order to court public opinion, 
was about to make him her protege, he had more 
opportunities to see foreigners of distinction, 
and he was sought after by some of them. Thus 
it is that Diderot was already fifty years old 
when he began to know England through the 
English. 

Are we to believe that Goldsmith had met him 
as early as 1754 ? It is a point of literary his- 
tory which it is not very easy to clear up. 
Goldsmith was in Paris in that year, and at- 
tended those courses in chemistry, given by 
Eouelle, which have been preserved in notes 
taken by Diderot; he might have become ac- 
quainted with the philosopher and Kousseau in 
the laboratory of the famous chemist, but of 
this there is no evidence. He only mentions 
7 



82 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Diderot incidentally, in a passage of his incom- 
plete Memoirs of M. de Voltaire (1759) : 

" The person who writes this Memoir, who 
had the honour and the pleasure of being his 
(Voltaire's) acquaintance, remembers to have 
seen him in a select company of wits of both 
sexes in Paris, when the subject happened to 
turn upon English taste and learning. Fonte- 
nelle, who was of the party, and who, being 
(was?) unacquainted with the language or au- 
thors of the country he undertook to condemn, 
with a spirit truly vulgar began to revile both. 
Diderot, who liked the English, and knew some- 
thing of their literary pretensions, attempted to 
vindicate their poetry and learning, but with 
unequal abilities. The company quickly per- 
ceived that Eontenelle was superior in the dis- 
pute, and were surprised at the silence which 
Voltaire had preserved all the former part of 
the night, particularly as the conversation hap- 
pened to turn upon one of his favourite topics. 
Fontenelle continued his triumph till about 
twelve o'clock, when Voltaire appeared at last 
roused from his reverie. His whole frame 
seemed animated. He began his defence with 
the utmost elegance mixed with spirit, and now 
and then let fall the finest strokes of raillery 
upon his antagonist; and his harangue lasted 
until three in the morning. I must confess, 
that, whether from national partiality, or from 



DIDEROT'S ENGLISH FRIENDS 83 

the elegant sensibility of his manner, I never 
was so much charmed, nor did I ever remember 
so absolute a victory as he gained in this 
dispute." 7 

This interesting anecdote, though plausible 
enough in some ways, unfortunately takes no 
account of the fact that, after his departure for 
Berlin in 1750, Voltaire did not return to Paris 
until 1778, the year of his death; in 1754, 
having fled from the court of the King of Prus- 
sia, he was looking for a safe refuge "in the 
free canton of Geneva." On the other hand, 
we know that Goldsmith's recollections are not 
infrequently inaccurate, especially when he 
wishes to provide interesting reading. He either 
wrongly imagined that Diderot and Fontenelle 
were present at a conversation which took place 
in Switzerland, or made a mistake in mixing 
Voltaire with his reminiscences of Parisian 

T Goldsmith, Miscell. Works, Globe ed. (Prof. Masson), 
1884, pp. 500-501. John Forster, Life and Times of 0. 
Goldsmith, first pointed out the weak points of this story 
(vol. I, pp. 67-69, in 2d ed., 1854), and suggested that 
the meeting might have taken place at "Les Delices." 
But then, as Austin Dobson remarks (Life of Goldsmith, 
1888, p. 40), how is one to account for the presence in 
Switzerland of Fontenelle and Diderot, to say nothing 
of the " select company of wits of both sexes"? 



84 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

salons. It is likely enough that, on such an 
occasion, Diderot may have vindicated the 
literature of England ; but that he was so easily 
worsted in an argument, even by Eontenelle, is 
less credible. If it is to be admitted, therefore, 
that Goldsmith's anecdote has some foundation 
in fact, the natural conclusion is that Diderot 
himself scored the success here ascribed to Vol- 
taire ; but that Goldsmith, having had an oppor- 
tunity to hear Voltaire also undertake a defence 
of England, when he later called on him 
at "Les Delices," blended the two incidents 
into one. 

It is much to be regretted that Diderot's 
letters cannot give us more light than they do 
on his English acquaintances, both before and 
after 1763. His Correspondence with Mile 
Volland has been transmitted to us in an incom- 
plete state: it is said to have included 546 let- 
ters, 8 only 139 of which are known to us. It 
is not impossible that a part if not the whole of 
what is now missing may some day be found. 
But it seems probable that the lost letters have 

8 See (Euv., XX, 103, in the notice by M. Tourneux 
on the lost and destroyed writings of Diderot. 



DIDEEOT'S ENGLISH FEIENDS 85 

been, for private reasons, destroyed, either by 
the Volland family before the Correspondence 
was returned to Diderot after Sophie's death 
(1774), or by Diderot himself, or by his 
daughter. The letters which are printed in the 
Assezat-Tourneux edition were written during 
eight months of 1759, six months of 1760, two 
months of 1761, four months of 1762, while 
there are but a few scattered letters left for the 
years 1765, 1766, 1767, 1768, 1769, 1772, 
1773, and 1774. It will be noted that the years 
1763 and 1764, which are most interesting to 
us as representing the period when the great 
exodus of the English to France took place, con- 
tributed nothing at all to that Correspondence 
as we know it. 

From the earliest of those letters, however, 
those which were written in 1759 and 1760, we 
have seen that Diderot had just made a first- 
hand acquaintance with the English tempera- 
ment and intellect, in the person of le pere 
Hoop. The naive admiration of the French 
philosopher, his sympathy for Hoop and his 
spleen, his interest in English manners and the 
British Parliament, all tend to prove that, to 



86 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

him, Hoop was a rare and curious find. It was 
more than fifteen years since Diderot had risen 
out of obscurity ; but he had been too poor, and 
too busy with his Encyclopedic, to entertain 
distinguished guests at his own house, or to go 
out and meet them in the spheres of fashionable 
society. It must be remembered that, like his 
friend Rousseau, Diderot never was at his ease 
in society ; that he preferred philosophic discus- 
sions among men to the conversation of ladies ; 
and that Madame d'Epinay thought it deplor- 
able that he should be so careless of the homage 
which " the world " would have liked to pay to 
his genius. Hence the seemingly dispropor- 
tionate importance of Hoop in Diderot's letters : 
if the melancholy Scotch surgeon was not the 
first Briton whom Diderot met, he at least gave 
Diderot his first chance thoroughly to canvass a 
denizen of the Land of Philosophy. 

Who was Hoop, " old Hoop," le pere Hoop f 
— "We call him le pere Hoop" Diderot ex- 
plains, "because he is a wrinkled, dry, oldish- 
looking man" (XVIII, 407). He was, to 
some extent, a romantic figure. Not only did 
he afford Diderot a rare opportunity of hearing, 



DIDEROT'S ENGLISH FKIENDS 87 

from an actual sufferer, all about that incom- 
prehensible English disorder which puzzled the 
gay, sociable Frenchmen of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, little acquainted yet with the mal de vivre; 
but, beside la tristesse anglaise, he had some- 
thing of the vertu then ascribed to his nation. 
Born in Scotland, probably a younger son of a 
noble family, 9 he had studied medicine under 

•A learned and respected friend, Dr Edward Nichol- 
son, the translator of Diderot's Entretien d'un Philo- 
sophe avec la Marechale {A Philosophical Conversation, 
London, 1875), suggested to us that "Hoop" probably 
was Diderot's French way of pronouncing and spelling 
the name "Hope"; compare the change of "Barn- 
well" into "Barnevelt," because Dutch names were less 
strange to the French about 1750 and 1760 than Eng- 
lish names, and the name of Van der Hoop was 
then more particularly familiar to all. — Now, whether 
"Hoop" was or was not one of the three brothers 
of Charles Hope, second Earl of Hopetoun (1710- 
1791), he certainly belonged to the firm of Hope 
and Co. in Amsterdam, — and this connection with the 
Netherlands further accounts for the "Hoop" spelling; 
but we have not been able to ascertain whether he was 
Thomas, the founder of that flourishing English concern, 
who died in Dec., 1779, aged 75 (see Gentl. Mag., 1780, 
p. 50), or Adrian, or Henry. — Voltaire, in a letter to the 
Marquis Albergati Capacelli (Delices, Oct. 3, 1760), 
speaks of a "Mr. Hope, half -English, half -Dutch," not 
Diderot 's ' ' Hoop, ' ' who was then at Grandval, but prob- 
ably a brother and partner: "Signer mio amabile, caro 



88 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

one of the famous Gregorys; then he had gone 
to trade abroad. He had begun to build up a 
little fortune in Spain, when he heard that his 
eldest brother had brought shame and dishonor 
on the family, and driven his parents and 
sisters from hearth and home : Hoop came back 
to England, restored his people to happiness, 
and chastised the wicked brother. Then Hoop 
resumed his wanderings, for pleasure as well as 
for purposes of trade, going as far as China. 
And now, in 1759 and 1760, weary of life, 
longing for Vaneantissement, he was the guest 
of Baron d'Holbach at his country-seat of 
Grandval; in the dismal October evenings, by 
the fireside, or in afternoon rambles through the 
rain, over the hills that border the Marne, he 
gave Diderot the benefit of his knowledge not 
only of the life and institutions of England, as 
we have already seen, but of the Chinese and 
the Scottish highlanders. 

The Chinese were full of absorbing interest 
to Holbach and Diderot, and they discussed 

protettoxe di tutte le buone arti, vi ho seritto per mezzo 
d , un cavaliere chiamato M. Hope, mezzo Inglese, mezzo 
Ollandese, e richissimo, dunque tre volte libero. Egli 
va a vedere tutta 1 'Italia e la Greeia aneora. . . ." 



DIDEBOT'S ENGLISH FEIENDS 89 

them with Hoop late into the night, with their 
candle-sticks in their hands, before retiring to 
bed. Hoop was fond of the Chinese. He de- 
scribed them as wonderfully quiet and self- 
possessed, very punctilious in their forms of 
courtesy, sly in trade, and full of strange 
notions concerning art (XVIII, 407, 499; 
XIX, 11-12). 

Nations living in remote countries, Chinese, 
Iroquois, Tahitians, and even the Highlanders, 
those " savages of Europe," were interesting to 
eighteenth-century philosophers not merely be- 
cause their religious, political, and moral notions 
were different from those of Europeans, but 
because it was assumed that, being nearer 
"nature," they could throw some light on the 
foundations of religion, politics, and ethics. 
This early form of anthropology used the facts 
derived from the experience of travelers for 
critical and polemical ends, adducing the ex- 
ample of unsophisticated savages to confirm or 
to undermine the philosophic ideas of more 
civilized nations. Thus Holbach wanted to 
prove man to be a naturally vicious beast, after 
the system of Hobbes ; while Diderot, following 



90 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Shaftesbury, vindicated virtue and the natural 
goodness of human nature. The tales of sav- 
ages related by Hoop and others served as argu- 
ments to clinch their controversy. 

" Our mountaineers," said Hoop, " are naked, 
brave, revengeful; on occasions when they eat 
all together, towards the end of the meal, when 
their heads are heated with wine, when old 
quarrels begin to be revived and high words to 
fly, do you know how they restrain one another ? 
They all draw their poniards, and stick them 
into the table, beside their glasses. That will 
answer the first insult" (XIX, 8). Although 
they know the value of gold and silver, they 
would not betray the Pretender when he fled to 
their caves for safety, — "a proof of man's 
natural goodness," says Diderot in conclusion. 

More terrible stories were told by General 
Dieskau, who some time before had returned 
from Canada, and was now a visitor at Grand- 
val (Nov. 1760). Dieskau, after an uneven 
battle against the English and Iroquois, 10 had 
been picked up on the field horribly wounded, 

10 The battle around Fort Edward, on the southern end 
of the Lae du Saint-Sacrement, named Lake George by 
General Johnson. 



DIDEBOT'S ENGLISH FRIENDS 91 

and carried into the same tent with General 
Johnson : " The Englishman would never allow 
his own wounds to he dressed before those of 
his enemy had been attended to. What a 
moment for natural goodness and virtue to show 
themselves ! It was in the midst of blood and 
carnage. ... I could give you a hundred more 
examples of it." Two more are given, which 
had come into the conversation. " No, my dear 
friend, nature has not made us wicked ; it is bad 
education, bad examples, bad legislation which 
corrupt us." But what of those Iroquois, Hol- 
bach would say, who wanted to massacre Dieskau 
in Johnson's very tent, in order to avenge the 
deaths of some o£ their chiefs? Dieskau had 
had a narrow escape then: carried from the 
camp into a city, for more safety, he was found 
there by the enraged Iroquois, and stabbed 
several times before the English could rescue 
him. "Ah! you will say, where is natural 
goodness? Who had corrupted those Indians? 
Who inspired them with feelings of revenge and 
treachery ? " Diderot replies : " The gods, my 
friend, the gods. Revenge is a religious virtue 
among those savages. They believe that the 



92 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Great Spirit, who dwells behind a mountain 
some little way from Quebec, awaits them after 
death, that he will judge them, and value their 
merit by the number of scalps they bring" 
(XIX, 8). 

Among the many anecdotes which Diderot 
heard from Hoop, a certain histoire polissonne 
is of some interest in that it bears a curious 
likeness to a large and rather objectionable 
chapter 11 in Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Sterne 
there discusses at length the invention of a 
Parisian apothecary for the administering of 
" prenatal baptism," together with the Sorbonic 
consultation and decision relating thereto. 
Ample evidence exists 12 that such a contrivance 
was suggested, and deliberated upon by the Sor- 
bonne, in 1733 ; it is, like the famous formula 
of excommunication to which Mr Shandy re- 
sorted when Dr Slop wanted to curse Obadiah, 
another of Sterne's little jokes on Popery. ISTow, 

11 Chapter XX, in Prof.. Saintsbury 's elegant edition of 
Sterne. 

"Sterne's reference is not fictitious: see Deventer, 
Observations sur le manuel des accouchement s, Paris, 
4to, 1734, p. 366; the Sorbonie deliberations took place 
March 30 and April 10, 1733. 



DIDEROT'S ENGLISH FRIENDS 93 

Hoop tells a similar story of a Scotch doctor, 
one of the Gregorys, in the very year when the 
irreverent tale was embodied in the first volume 
of Tristram. This volume had appeared Jan. 
1, 1760; Diderot tells Hoop's story Oct. 13, 
1760 (XVIII, 491). Is it likely that the 
Scotchman fathered the grotesque invention of 
the Parisian apothecary on his countryman? 
It is difficult to believe, especially as the two 
operations suggested differ materially. It is 
more probable that those two inventive and well- 
meaning geniuses, Gregory and the apothecary, 
had quite independently hit upon the same idea. 
A similar problem, or rather curiosity, of 
literary history will strike the student of Eng- 
lish literature in another of the Letters to Mile 
Volland (Oct. 1761 ; XIX, 73) . Diderot writes 
that he has been treated to a " Koman dinner " 
by two young German friends, Mcolai and De 
La Fermiere. Is there any relation between 
this repast, concocted according to the true pre- 
cepts of Apicius, and the episode, in Smollett's 
Peregrine Tickle (Chap. 44), of the "enter- 
tainment in the manner of the Ancients " ? 
Ten years had elapsed between the publication 



94 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

of Smollett's novel and the real dinner which 
fairly upset Diderot's digestion. We are not 
aware that such erudite meals, whether organ- 
ized by Swiss doctors or learned young Germans, 
were the fashion in Paris in the eighteenth 
century. A more plausible conjecture is, that 
the two German Peregrines were better read in 
contemporary English novels than their En- 
cyclopedic friend, and that they derived from 
Smollett the suggestion of a practical joke 
which they played upon him. 

In his journeys to and from Italy, it is well 
known that Smollett found nothing in France 
but occasions to vent his wrath against lazy 
postilions and greedy innkeepers all bent on 
aggravating him. He had no time or was not 
in a proper temper to call on philosophers ; Di- 
derot in his works mentions him only once, as 
a historian. 13 About Sterne, however, who in 
his Sentimental Journey ridiculed the ill-tem- 
pered traveler under the name of " Smelfungus," 
modern biographers of the author of the Tris- 
trapcedia are often positive on this point, that 
after arriving in Paris (Jan. 1762) he enter- 

13 Im the Encycl, article "Suicide"; (Euv., XVII, 237. 



DIDEROT'S ENGLISH FRIENDS 95 

tained a close friendship with the editor of the 
Encyclopedic. 1 * Of this there is no evidence in 
Diderot's Correspondence ; but then the Vollancf 
Letters for the early part of 176 2 are lost, as 
we have said before. We only know that Sterne 
wrote from Paris to Becket, his bookseller 
(April 22, 1762), asking him to send to his 
Parisian banker, for Diderot, all the works of 
Pope and of Cibber (with the Life of Cibber), 
Chaucer, Tillotson's Sermons, all of Locke, and 
the six volumes of Tristram Shandy, — this last 
as a present from the author : " I am forced to 
enclose. the card itself which we have received 
from Mr. Diderot, because I have not been able 
to make it all out — 'tis the last article but 
one." 15 We also know that there is much more 
than a tinge of Shandyism in Diderot's Jacques 
le Fataliste. Had he met the Sentimental Trav- 
eler at the house of Mile de Lespinasse, also an 
admirer and an imitator of Yorick's style? 

14 See W. L. Cross, Life and Times of Sterne, 1909, p. 
278;— Walter Sichel, Sterne, a study, 1910, pp. 215-217, 
is less positive. F. B. Barton, Influence de Sterne, 
Paris, 1911, p. 9, states that oil the relations between 
Sterne and Diderot we are "mal renseignes. ' ' 

15 British Museum, Egerton MSS, 1762 (Clonmel Soe. 
edit., Part I, p. 229). 



96 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

When Sterne was in Paris, in the first half of 
1762, he mentioned Diderot only twice: to 
Becket, when he ordered the books for him; 
and, a few days earlier, to Garrick, concerning 
Diderot's Natural Son, with little commenda- 
tion of that play : 

"... I have been these two days reading 
a tragedy, given me by a lady of talents to read, 
and conjecture if it would do for you — 'Tis 
from the plan of Diderot, and possibly half a 
translation of it — The Natural Son, or the 
Triumph of Virtue, in five acts — It has too 
much sentiment in it (at least for me), the 
speeches too long, and savour too much of 
preaching — this may be a second reason, it is 
not to my taste. 'Tis all love, love, love, 
throughout, without much separation in the 
character; so I fear it would not do for your 
stage, and perhaps for the very reason which 
recommends it to a French one." 16 

That Diderot and Sterne were acquainted, is 
not improbable; that they were friends, needs 
to be proved. They bore some likeness to each 

16 April 10, 1762 (Clonmel Soc. ed,, vol. Ill, Part I, 
p. 221). Sterne also asked Becket whether he would care 
to print that translation of Diderot's play, stating again 
that it would not do for the English stage. It was 
eventually printed by Dodsley, under the title Dorval, 
1767. 



DIDEROT'S ENGLISH FRIENDS 97 

other by their sentiment, or sensibilite; yet 
their temperaments were very different. Yorick 
the parson had a great deal of humor which 
Denis the philosopher lacked; and inversely 
Denis abounded in the " preaching " earnest- 
ness in which Yorick was somewhat deficient. 
Whether the likeness, or the contrast, bred 
interest in each of them for the other, remains 
a matter of speculation. Sterne may have 
looked with good-natured amusement, devoid of 
Walpolean contempt, on the robust sentiment 
of the philosopher from Langres ; while Diderot 
was pleasantly puzzled by the strange novelties 
of Shandyism. 

Gibbon arrived in Paris January 28, 1763, 
and was as warmly welcomed as Sterne had 
been. He had become comparatively well 
known in Parisian society by his Essai sur 
Vetude de la litterature, in French, published 
in London the preceding year, and appreciated 
in a flattering manner by French reviewers. 17 
In his Memoirs, he expresses in a characteristic 
way the feelings of pride and delight which 

"Gibbon, Memoirs, prefixed to his Miscell. Works, 
Basel, 1796, vol. I, pp. 84, 105-106, and 125-127. 

8 



98 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

were those of most English visitors to Paris 
when "Anglomania" reigned there: 

"... The principal end of my journey was 
to enjoy the society of a polished and amiable 
people, in whose favor I was strongly preju- 
diced, and to converse with some authors, whose 
conversation, as I fondly imagined, must be far 
more pleasing and instructive than their writ- 
ings. The moment was happily chosen. At the 
close of a successful war the British name was 
respected on the continent. 

Clarum et venembile nomen 
Gentibus. 

Our opinions, our fashions, even our games, 
were adopted in France, a ray of national glory 
illuminated each individual, and every English- 
man was supposed to be born a patriot and a 
philosopher. For myself, I carried a personal 
recommendation; my name and my Essay were 
already known ; the compliment of having writ- 
ten in the French language entitled me to some 
returns of civility and gratitude. . . '.. Of the 
men of genius of the age, Montesquieu and Fon> 
tenelle were no more; Voltaire resided on his 
own estate near Geneva; Rousseau in the pre- 
ceding year had been driven from his hermitage 
in Montmorency; and I blush at my having 
neglected to seek, in this journey, the acquaint- 
ance of Buffon. Among the men of letters 



DIDEROT'S ENGLISH FRIENDS 99 

whom I saw, D'Alembert and Diderot held the 
foremost rank in merit, or at least in fame." 

In the society of these men and of others of 
less importance, at the hospitable homes of 
Mesdames Geoff rin and Du Bocage, of Hel : 
vetius and Holbach, " fourteen weeks insensibly 
stole away," at the end of which Gibbon regret- 
fully left Paris and proceeded on his way to 
Lausanne and Italy. 

Boswell, on his return from Italy and Cor- 
sica, stayed some time in Paris in 1765 and 
1766, before he escorted Therese Levasseur to 
England. With his " rage of knowing anybody 
that ever was talked of," and his habit of forcing 
himself upon people "in spite of their teeth 
and their doors," 18 the Laird of Auchinleck 
should have been at least as eager as Gibbon to 
seek the acquaintance of Diderot, as he had 
sought that of Voltaire, Bousseau, and many 
more. Yet, as he nowhere boasts about it, we 
must perforce believe that he somehow failed in 
the attempt. 

With characteristic kindness, Diderot served 
as a guide to many English visitors who wanted 

18 H. Walpole, Letters, V, 192. 



100 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

to see Paris. He took two Englishmen one day 
to hear Eckard, another day to hear Mile Bayon, 
two great singers. " I had two Englishmen to 
take about/' he says simply. " They have gone 
back home, having seen everything; and I find 
that I miss them very much. They were not 
enthusiastic about their country. They re- 
marked that our language had been perfected, 
while theirs had remained almost barbaric. 
1 That/ I said, i is because no one meddles with 
yours, whereas we have forty geese watching 
over the Capitol ; ' a comparison which struck 
them as being all the more apt, because our 
geese, like those of Eome, watch over the Capitol 
but do not defend it." 19 Another day, he gave 
a warm letter of introduction to a young man 

19 Salon of 1767; XI, 374; also in the Volland Corre- 
spondence (XIX, 266-267), under date Aug. 24, 1768;* 
the Salon was written in that year. It had early become 
a commonplace of English courtesy to "envy" the 
French their Academy. The Abbe Le Blane, who all his 
life yearned in vain for a seat in that celebrated com- 
pany, had enlarged upon this same topic, quoting Dryden, 
Locke, and Swift (Lettres d'un Frangais, Lett. 65). 
It seems to have remained a fashion to this day, in 
England, to blame the French for generally not setting 
enough value on a blessing for which other nations are 
hankering. 



DIDEROT'S ENGLISH FRIENDS 101 

from Pennsylvania who would not return to 
America without having seen, on his way 
through England, "the famous Mr. Hume." 20 

Three great Englishmen who were in Paris 
after 1763 deserve special mention, because 
their relations with Diderot were not of a con- 
jectural nature, but were characterized by true 
friendliness: Garrick, Hume, and Wilkes asso- 
ciated with him in Paris, and corresponded with 
him after they had returned to England. Of 
this correspondence little is as yet known; but 
it may be surmised that, if the bulk of Diderot's 
Correspondence as we have it is to receive sub- 
stantial additions in the future, a number of 
such additions will probably come from the 
papers of those and other English contempo- 
raries. 21 

It is, for instance, a matter of surprise that 
there should be but one letter extant from Di- 
derot to David Garrick. That their relations 
were most friendly may safely be assumed, not 

20 See Appendix I, p. 470. 

21 Some curious letters of Diderot to Hume, not col- 
lected in the Assezat-Tourneux edition, and some un- 
published letters to Wilkes, will be found at the end of 
this book, Appendix I. 



102 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

so much on the strength of Diderot's philosophic 
familiarity with his "dear Roscius" in that 
single .letter— f or with whom could not Diderot 
be familiar ? — as because there is abundant evi- 
dence that the English actor was greatly ad- 
mired by Diderot and his circle in Paris, when 
he favored them with exhibitions of his histri- 
onic talent, and that he exerted a rather impor- 
tant influence on the esthetic creed of Diderot. 
According to Garrick's latest biographer, 22 in a 
work most interesting to us in that it deals 
especially with that actor's French friends, it 
was probably not in Garrick's first journey to 
Paris, in 1751, but in his tour to France and 
Italy in 1763 and 1764, that he became ac- 
quainted with Diderot. The philosopher, who 
in his youth had yearned for the glory of the 
stage, and in whose general plan of dramatic 

22 P. A. Hedgcock, D. GarricTc et ses amis frangais, 
Paris, 1911, p. 66. We shall further develop, in our 
Chapters VI and VIII, the importance of Garrick's in- 
fluence on Diderot's critical ideas. Mr Hedgcock graph- 
ically depicts (from Garrick's Memoirs, p. 205) warm 
discussions between Garrick, Diderot, and Marmontel, at 
the house of Baron d'Holbaeh, with the Abbe Morellet 
watching the scene. On the discrepancy, amounting to 
a contradiction, between Diderot's ideas on acting in 
1758 and in 1770, see Mr Hedgcock 's book, pp. 173-174. 



DIDEEOT'S ENGLISH FRIENDS 103 

reforms there was so much of criticism and 
advice concerning the actor's art, seems to have 
learned a great deal from the famous Garrick, 
or at least to have found, in his discussions with 
him, opportunities to revise his own theories 
and adjust his points of view. Before meeting 
Garrick, Diderot had freely asserted, and often 
endeavored to prove, that genius is essentially 
enthusiastic, unconscious of itself, as sponta- 
neous and instinctive as nature itself; after he 
had known him, he brilliantly defended an 
exactly opposite theory, and defined artistic 
genius as being, above all, self-possessed, con- 
scious of all its means, and very careful not to 
allow any admixture or interference of real with 
fictitious emotions. The occasion to develop in 
writing this famous "paradox" came for him 
in 1770, when he reviewed a pamphlet by an 
obscure actor, Antonio Sticoti, entitled Garrick 
or the English Actors. 

Garrick, on his return from Italy through 
Paris in 1765, played the dagger scene from 
Macbeth before some friends, again eliciting 
enthusiastic admiration, of which we find an 
echo in Grimm and Diderot's Correspondance 



104 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

litter aire (July, 1765). His bust by Le Moyne 
was exhibited in the Salon of 1765, and dis- 
cussed by Diderot (X, 425). Walpole, in a 
letter dated March 26, 1765, could not help 
noticing Garrick's great popularity in Paris. 
And we have seen that, when Holbach visited 
London in the same year, he called on the great 
actor, and was shown the monument which he 
had erected to Shakespeare. Twelve years later 
Gibbon found as warm a memory of Garrick in 
Parisian circles as if the latter had but just 
returned to England. 

Hume, as well as Garrick, had made a journey 
to Prance at a comparatively early stage of his 
life, and sojourned there from 1734 until 1737 : 
it was then that he wrote, mostly at La Pleche, 
his Treatise on Human Nature, which he pub- 
lished in 1739. That work, on which he had 
founded great expectations, "fell dead-born 
from the press ; " and, although it is to-day for 
us his most lasting title to glory, it does not 
seem to have been appreciated in accordance 
with its true value in his lifetime. In 1763, 
he came to Paris as Secretary of Embassy, 
under Lord Hertford. Diderot knew him 



DIDEKOT'S ENGLISH FRIENDS 105 

already as the author of Essays, Moral and 
Political (1741-1742), and the Inquiry con- 
cerning Human Understanding (1748) : the 
French translation of the Inquiry (1751) by 
Mile de la Chaux, had been revised by Diderot. 23 
He also admired Hume as a bold political 
thinker, and the stern historian of the Stuarts. 
A feeling of genuine friendship sprang up 
between the two philosophers: shortly after 
arriving in Paris, Hume wrote to his Scottish 
friend Dr Blair that Diderot, D'Alembert, 
Buffon, Marmontel, Duclos, Helvetius, and the 
President Henault were the men whom he liked 
best. 24 He further said: "There is not one 
deist among them." Indeed most of them were 
far beyond that intermediate stage of infidelity, 
as he very soon discovered. In a letter to Mile 
Volland (XIX, 185), Diderot relates how 
Hume was undeceived; and he later repeated 
the anecdote to Sir Samuel Romilly. Hume, 

s The Inquiry, in the first two editions, had been 
entitled Philosophical Essays concerning Human Under- 
standing. — See W. Knight, Hume, 1886, p. 50. As early 
as 1759 and 1760, Hume's philosophical and historical 
works had been translated into French. 

24 J. H. Burton, Life and Corresp. of D. Hume, 1846, 
voL II, pp. 180-181. 



106 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

discussing the topic of natural religion at one 
of Holbach's dinners, declared that he did not 
believe in the existence of atheists, because he 
had never seen any: "You are unfortunate," 
replied his host, " for here you are dining with 
seventeen of them for the first time." 25 The 
change of atmosphere from Edinburgh to Paris 
was of course in all respects very great. But 
Hume was not the man to suffer from it: de- 
lighted with his new surroundings, popular in 
town with the ladies, he was even courted at 
Versailles, where he found the Dauphin en- 
gaged in reading one of his works (XIX, 209), 
and was treated by three little princes of the 
blood of France — the future Louis XVI, Louis 
XVIII, and Charles X — with compliments 
memorized for the purpose. 26 Diderot seems 
above all to have esteemed him for his benevolent 
aspect, his true good-nature, and his " fat Ber- 
nardine cheeks." After Hume's return to 
England, the French philosopher wrote letters 
to him, and it is interesting to note that they 

25 Memoirs of Romilly, 2d ed., 1840, vol. I, p. 179 
(Nov. 16, 1781). 

26 On Hume's popularity in Paris, see W. Knight, 
Hume, Chap. VII. 






DIDEROT'S ENGLISH FRIENDS 107 

were always letters of recommendation, some- 
times to introduce a friend of Madame Diderot's 
who had resolved to try and make a living in 
England, or simply to oblige an obscure young 
Pennsylvanian. 

The consideration shown Hume by the French 
court was also extended, in a lesser degree, to 
another Englishman visiting France, in 1763 
and 1764, somewhat against his will and in an 
altogether unofficial capacity. John Wilkes, on 
arriving in Paris (Dec. 29, 1763), called on the 
English ambassador, and left his card with 
Hume, whom he shortly after met again at the 
house of Baron d'Holbach. When Wilkes was 
declared an outlaw in England (Nov., 1764), 
the ambassador ceased to invite him to his re- 
ceptions; but the French court and French 
society showed themselves quite as hospitable 
as before, and even more so — a just retaliation 
for the excellent treatment accorded the perse- 
cuted Helvetius in London in that same year ! 
Diderot tells us of a most romantic love affair 
which the English patriot had in Naples in 
1765, and which may be to his credit or not, 



108 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

as one chooses to regard it. 27 When Wilkes was 
returned at the polls for Middlesex (March 28, 
1768), Diderot warmly congratulated him. 28 
In another letter to his " dear Gracchus," he 
depicted France in 17 71 as being on the verge 
of a revolution; and we have seen, in the pre- 
ceding chapter, with what glowing enthusiasm 
he greeted Wilkes's speeches a few years later 
in favor of the American colonists. 

In writing to Wilkes in 1771, Diderot took 
the liberty to recommend to him a certain Mile 
Biheron, who excelled in making anatomical 
models and in teaching anatomy, and who was 
going to England. This lady knew Franklin, and 
occasionally carried letters for him to England, 
evidently without the knowledge of Diderot. 
He was keenly interested in the great Amer- 
ican, but it does not appear that he was ever 

27 In a letter to Mile Volland, XIX, 202.. Contempo- 
rary letters from Winckelmann and Boswell to Wilkes, 
preserved in the Wilkes Collection of MSS at the British 
Museum, evince a great deal of interest in that affair 
with "la Corradini"; but Wilkes seemed rather inclined 
to drop the subject. 

28 This letter (April 2, 1768), republished in XIX, 490, 
from the English translation given in The Correspon- 
dence of the late John Wilkes with his friends (1805), 
is not known in the French original. 



DIDEKOT'S ENGLISH FRIENDS 109 

able to gain access to him. He admired him 
as scientist, free-thinker, patriot, and the servant 
of a great cause. As early as 1754, in his 
Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, he 
had referred to Franklin's Experiments and 
Observations on Electricity, translated in 1752 
by the Abbe d'Alibard, as a model of scientific 
investigation. He later read some of Frank- 
lin's political writings, published in French by 
Barbeu du Bourg together with Dickinson's 
Letters of a Pennsylvania Farmer (IV, 86) . But, 
when Franklin came to Paris as an agent of the 
American colonies, he associated more with the 
Economists than with the Philosophers. Di- 
derot, in a little dramatic sketch entitled Est-il 
bonf Est-il mediant? outlined by him in 1770 
and developed in 1781, represents himself as cu- 
riously inquiring from an official of the French 
government after the American patriot ; and he 
is then informed that Franklin is indeed "a 
sharp Quaker," un acuto Qudkero, — a charac- 
terization which he evidently owed to his con- 
nection with the city of Philadelphia. 29 

29 Concerning Mile Biheron, whom Diderot also recom- 
mended in 1774 to Catherine II (CEuv., XX, 62), see 
M. M. Tourneux's work on Diderot et Catherine II, pp. 



110 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

It must have been shortly after his return 
from Petersburg and the court of "the North- 
ern Semiramis " that Diderot met Burke, prob- 
ably at the house of Mile de Lespinasse. 30 
Burke, according to the testimony of Mme du 
Demand, spoke French very imperfectly, and 
on the other hand Diderot does not seem to have 
been able to speak English as easily as he read 
it; so that it is not likely that they became 
very intimately acquainted. Sympathy would 
have been lacking for the formation of ties of 
friendship between these two men. Diderot 
could not think much of a man who had come 
to France in order to entrust the supervision of 
his son's education to a French bishop, who was 
thrown into raptures by his visit to the court 
of Versailles, and who is known to have brought 
back from the Parisian philosophic salons a 
passionate hatred of all free-thinkers. 31 

387 ff.; and on her connection with Franklin, see Frank- 
lin in France, by Edw. E. Hale and Edw. E. Hale Jr, 
Boston, 1889, 2 vols. (vol. I, pp. 17, 73). Diderot had 
studied anatomy with Mile Biheron, who for some time 
had been his neighbor on the Place de PEstrapade (IX, 
240, n.). 

30 J. Morley, Burke, 1879, p. 66. Little is known about 
Burke's residence in Paris. 

31 In a letter from Horace Walpole to the Countess of 



DIDEBOT'S ENGLISH FEIENDS 111 

The French disciples of English thinkers had 
indeed gone far beyond their masters in bold- 
ness of speculation ; so that the truly represent- 
ative Englishmen who chanced to visit Paris in 
the twenty years which preceded the French 
Eevolution stood aghast at a freedom of thought 
and speech which was no longer, if it ever had 
truly been, fashionable or "proper" in Great 
Britain. The characteristic fondness of the 
English for order, for compromise, and for 

Upper Ossory (March 11, 1773, Toynbee ed., vol. VIII, 
252), we read that "Mr Burke is returned from Paris, 
where he was so much the mode that, happening to 
dispute with the philosophers, it grew the fashion to be 
Christians. St. Patrick himself did not make more 
converts. ' ' 

Lord Morley aptly quotes (Burke, p. 69) a passage 
from Burke's Speech on the Belief of Protestant Dis- 
senters (1773), from which one might think that, had 
Burke been born a French subject, he could have found 
it in him to endorse the persecuting policy of the French 
monarchy: "These [the free-thinkers] are the people 
against whom you ought to aim the shaft of the law; 
these are the men to whom, arrayed in all the terrors of 
government, I would say, 'You shall not degrade us into 
brutes.' . . . The most horrid and cruel blow that can 
be offered to civil society is through atheism. . . . The 
infidels are outlaws of the constitution, not of this 
country, but of the human race. They are never, never 
to be supported, never to be tolerated." 



112 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

every kind of half-way measures in vital mat- 
ters, that particular form of practical sense 
which renders men unwilling rather than unfit 
frankly to deal with great questions of meta- 
physics and religion as well as politics, must 
have revolted against the intellectual radicalism 
and the relentlessly analytic bent of French 
thinkers. Dr Johnson in his short trip to Paris 
in 1775 found time to call on Freron and to 
make friends with Benedictine monks, 32 but 
steered clear of those haunts of infidelity which 
had so warmly welcomed a Hume and a Wilkes. 
Diderot, three years before his death, had a 
conversation with Sir Samuel Komilly which 
may serve to illustrate this point of the divorce 
between the fundamental tendencies of the 
French and the English intellects at this time. 
" He praised the English," says Komilly, " for 
having led the way to true philosophy, but the 
adventurous genius of the French, he said, had 
pushed them on before their guides. 'Vous 
autres,' these were his words, 'vous melez la 
theologie avec la philosophic; c'est gater tout, 

'"Boswell, Life of Johnson (Birkbeck Hill), vol. II, 
p. 441 ff. 



DIDEROT'S ENGLISH FRIENDS 113 

c'est meler le mensonge avec la verite; il faut 
sabrer la theologie.' . . . 'Vous Anglais vous 
croyez un peu en Dieu; pour nous autres nous 
n'y croyons guere.' " 33 As Romilly's corre- 
spondent showed some curiosity concerning the 
famous French philosopher, and further in- 
quired of Romilly what he thought of him, our 
traveler remained on the safe ground of gen- 
eralities : he was " not vain enough to pronounce 
what was the extent of Diderot's and D'Alem- 
bert's learning and capacity," but he expatiated 
on the pity and horror deserved by such as 
labor under the " deadly contagious disease " of 
atheism, and, being inclined to think that they 
should not be spared, he took pleasure in quot- 
ing Plato against " unbounded toleration." Yet 
he was glad and not a little proud to have seen 
those famous men, "D'Alembert and Diderot, 
the most celebrated of all the writers then re- 
maining in France." Romilly goes on : 

"D'Alembert was in a very infirm state of 
health, and not disposed to enter much into con- 
versation with a person so shy and so unused to 
society as I was. Diderot, on the contrary, was 
83 Sir Samuel Romilly, Memoirs, 2d edit., 1840, vol. I, 
p. 179. 
9 



114 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

all warmth and eagerness, and talked to me with 
as little reserve as if I had been long and inti- 
mately acquainted with him. Bousseau, poli- 
tics, and religion, were the principal topics of 
his conversation. The Confessions of Rousseau 
were, at that time, expected shortly to appear; 
and it was manifest, from the bitterness with 
which Diderot spoke of that work and of its 
author, that he dreaded its appearance. On the 
subject of religion he made no disguise; or 
rather he was ostentatious of a total disbelief in 
the existence of a God. He talked very eagerly 
upon politics, and inveighed with great warmth 
against the tyranny of the French government. 
He told me that he had long meditated a work 
upon the death of Charles the First; that he 
had studied the trial of that prince; and that 
his intention was to have tried him over again, 
and to have sent him to the scaffold if he had 
found him guilty, but that he had at last relin- 
quished the design. In England he would have 
executed it, but he had not the courage to do 
so in France." 34 

^Eomilly, op. cit., pp. 63-64. Sir Samuel in Paris 
had associated a great deal with the Genevese watchmaker 
Eomilly, — a man not in any way related to him; this 
Swiss Eomilly, a former contributor to the Encyclopedic, 
introduced the Englishman to D'Alembert and Diderot, 
and made him side with Eousseau in the controversy 
here alluded to, which gave rise to so many digressions 
in Diderot's Essay on the reigns of Claudius and Nero, 
revised about this time. 



DIDEBOT'S ENGLISH FBIENDS 115 

It must have been very puzzling indeed for a 
French philosopher, after 1760, to find con- 
temporary England so different from what he 
had imagined. The contrast was particularly 
striking and painful to a man who, like Diderot, 
had read a great deal about England, and seen 
nothing of the country itself. Viewed through 
the works of Hobbes, Locke, Shaftesbury, 
Bolingbroke, the Deistic writers and Hume, and 
through the impressions of Muralt, Voltaire, 
and the Abbe Le Blanc, England appeared as 
being preeminently a revolutionary land, not at 
all averse to any kind of novelty in religion, 
politics, science, and literature. But when the 
Englishmen who came to Paris were questioned, 
when they took part in philosophic discussions, 
behold, quite another spirit was revealed: the 
Walpoles, the Burkes, the Romillys, nay, even 
the Humes, seemed unwilling to follow out 
their thinking to its legitimate conclusions ; 
they were inspired with decidedly conservative 
tendencies, and were far indeed from the 
Tolands, the Tindals, the Collinses, whose bold 
attacks on Christianity were being translated 
and republished by Diderot's friends, Naigeon 



116 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

and the Baron d'Holbaeh. The very names of 
the early Deists were loathed in England. 
Hume, whose rather independent manner of 
thinking on religious subjects had procured for 
him a bad reputation in his native country, had 
for a time been infatuated with the enemy of 
the Encyclopedists, Rousseau; and Rousseau 
himself found in England a wider sympathy 
(mingled of course with much orthodox blame) 
than any member of the Philosophic party, who 
had thought to be in the true English tradition. 
The fact is, that while French thinkers had 
enthusiastically welcomed the bolder results of 
English Rationalism, and nursed and fostered 
in French soil all the seeds of intellectual eman- 
cipation and positive thought that they had 
found in English works produced under the 
reigns of William III and Queen Anne, Eng- 
land under the first Georges had seen the Deists 
routed in controversy ; a revival of the religious 
spirit had been brought about by Methodism; 
political agitation had settled down into an 
apparently satisfactory system of parliamentary 
government. The two nations were drifting 



DIDEKOT'S ENGLISH FEIENDS 117 

farther and farther apart in spirit ; and the last 
representatives of French Philosophy tried to 
find the true English spirit, the real tradition 
of English thought, in the last of the Deists, 
Gibbon, Wilkes, and Hume. 



CHAPTER III 

THE MORALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 

If, of all French writers in the eighteenth cen- 
tury, Diderot is more generally known to-day 
under the title of " philosopher," if in his own 
lifetime he was commonly thus designated not 
only by " a few indulgent friends," but by France 
and Europe, it should be clearly understood that 
he did not owe that name to any special achieve- 
ment in the field of metaphysics, to any system of 
thought which he could call his own. He holds 
no place in the history of philosophy properly 
so-called : in the evolution of rationalistic thought 
between Descartes and Kant, Hume's phenome- 
nism and the materialism of Holbach and Hel- 
vetius are of much more account than Diderot's 
occasional excursions in the realm of metaphysics. 
He was, however, a philosopher in the more 
esoteric, broad, inaccurate sense which that word 
has to-day in unphilosophic spheres, and com- 
monly had in eighteenth-century society. To 
the larger part of every age and nation, since 
Socrates, ethical speculation divested of religious 
118 



THE MOEALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 119 

aspects has appeared to be the proper region of 
philosophy. Now, Diderot not only lived the 
simple life, looked "like an ancient orator," 
fought the battles of Kationalism against polit- 
ical and ecclesiastical abuses, evinced a universal 
interest in the sciences and arts, and was truly 
an "encyclopedic" genius, or (as Voltaire used 
to call him) a Pantophile; but he was, first and 
above all, a moralist. 

In 1745, when he had yet given nothing to 
the press except a translation of a Greek His- 
tory and of a Medical Dictionary, from the 
English, Diderot made his first attempt at 
authorship, or rather semi-authorship, by pub- 
lishing his paraphrase of the Inquiry concern- 
ing Virtue or Merit, which had appeared 1 in 
1711, as a part of the Characteristics of Anthony 
Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury. 

Shaftesbury's moral treatise was about that 
time extremely popular, both in England and 
France, for different reasons. To Shaftesbury's 
English disciples, to Bolingbroke, Hutcheson, 
Pope, and Hume, the Inquiry, appeared essen- 

1 First published by Toland in 1699, without the 
author's permission. 



120 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

tially as a victorious vindication of disinterested 
moral affections against Hobbes's reduction of 
all affections to those of the selfish kind. By 
French thinkers, the same work was considered 
as the first clear statement of " natural ethics " 
founded on "natural religion," that is, an 
ethical system with an independent, secular, 
non-revealed foundation, an application of 
Rationalism to the problems of conduct quite 
as rigorous and successful, yet less abstruse, 
than the Ethics of Spinoza, from which it was 
derived. 

The opening pages of the Inquiry may well 
have attracted the attention of Diderot, as of 
any contemporary inclined to free-thinking. 
Shaftesbury begins by contending, against a 
prevailing belief, that religion and virtue, 
although nearly related in many respects, are 
not inseparable companions. (Diderot, being 
immediately reminded of his brother, who had 
more of religion than of natural goodness, dedi- 
cated his paraphrase to him.) Are we not 
always more concerned about the honesty than 
about the religion of any man with whom we 
have some important transaction? It follows 



THE MORALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 121 

that virtue, or goodness, can be defined in itself, 
apart from any religious creed; and that the 
influence of each creed on natural morality 
should be properly investigated. 

Now, the main opinions relating to the Deity 
can be classified as follows: — Theism, accord- 
ing to which the universe is ruled for the best 
by a ruling mind; — Atheism, according to which 
the universe is ruled by chance; — Polytheism, 
according to which the universe is ruled by two 
or more minds, good in their nature ; — Dcemon- 
ism, according to which the universe is ruled by 
one or several minds, not absolutely good, but 
capable of following their mere will and fancy. 
— Lastly, various combinations of these main 
beliefs are possible, and have been or are ex- 
istent. 2 

Shaftesbury then proceeds to define goodness 
or virtue. He does not think it to be conceiv- 
able, or to have any meaning, in some individual 
imagined solitary, some hypothetic Crusoe of 
creation, living outside of any system or society 

2 See the Introduction to J. M. Robertson's edition of 
the Characteristics, Lond., 1900, 2 vols. — Also Thomas 
Fowler, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson (English Philos- 
ophers Series), 1883. 



122 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

of beings. Virtue therefore is essentially a 
social fact Self-interest and selfish passions, 
good in themselves, are vicious only when 
opposed to the general good. Since everything 
is a part of some system or systems in the great 
whole, it follows that nothing is absolutely good 
or evil in nature. It follows also that no reli- 
gious faith or philosophic doctrine is bad in 
itself, but that all are to be judged according 
to the measure in which they increase or weaken 
the principles of right social action or morality. 
— Now, none of the doctrines enumerated above 
can deprive men of their natural feeling con- 
cerning right and wrong. This feeling, in spite of 
Locke's opinion against innateness, is described 
by Shaftesbury as innate, thereby resembling 
the esthetic feeling, which Shaftesbury also takes 
to be born with man. But, if the moral feeling 
cannot be done away with by those systems of 
belief, it may be altered or obscured by them; 
and in this respect atheism is less to be feared 
than superstition, which has always proved fer- 
tile in persecutions. Lastly, the passions may be 
used for or against natural virtue by the differ- 
ent systems concerning the Deity: the hope of 



THE MORALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 123 

rewards and the fear of punishment hereafter 
are strong incentives which are lacking in athe- 
ism; but theism does not look upon the affec- 
tions of fear and hope as very commendable 
motives, because they detract from the merit 
of virtuous living. The contemplation of the 
order of the universe, the belief that everything 
is for the best, a strong persuasion that personal 
interest is inseparable from the social interest, 
are for Shaftesbury the best foundations of 
virtue. 

Thus theism, optimism, utilitarianism, con- 
stitute the sum of this ethical system. Widely 
tolerant of all religious and metaphysical be- 
liefs, condemning none absolutely, but pointing 
out the advantages and defects of each of them 
for moral action, placing morality outside of 
them and above them, and defining virtue as an 
intelligent pursuit of happiness through social 
benevolence and a wise management of the indi- 
vidual affections, such a system could not fail 
to attract a great deal of interest in an age when 
men had grown tired of religious strifes, and 
were looking for a positive foundation of moral- 
ity. The apparent logic of the doctrine, its 



124 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

clear presentation, and the further developments 
which it received in the other essays and reflec- 
tions subjoined to the Inquiry in the publication 
of the Characteristics, possibly also that very 
tone of urbanity which Charles Lamb later on 
ridiculed (not very justly) by calling it "gen- 
teel/' made Shaftesbury's moral system ex- 
tremely popular among men intent on popu- 
larizing philosophy. Bolingbroke and Pope 
developed it in prose and verse, and through 
them it reached Voltaire and arrested his atten- 
tion. Montesquieu, in his Pensees Diverses, 
declared : " The four great poets are Plato, 
Malebranche, Shaftesbury, Montaigne," 3 — pos- 
sibly meaning, to use a modern phrase, the four 
great creators of new moral values. In Ger- 
many, Shaftesbury's system practically replaced 
the similar doctrine expounded by Leibnitz in 
his Theodicee (1710), and affected the ethics 
and esthetics of Kant. In England, through 
Hutcheson, Hume, Bentham, Stuart Mill, and 
Herbert Spencer, rational ethics became as it 
were ingrained in English philosophy. 

As for Diderot, what impelled him to trans- 
3 Quoted in J. M. Kobertson, Introd., p. ix. 



THE MORALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 125 

late or adapt Shaftesbury's Inquiry f And with 
what reserves or alterations did he effect that 
adaptation ? 

To a young man with a philosophic turn of 
mind, anxious to probe the best solutions given 
to the problem of human conduct, there was in 
France, about 1745, little else to choose between 
but the various kinds of "heathen virtue," on 
the one hand, and Christianity in a more or 
less Jansenistic garb, on the other. Ancient 
Pyrrhonism had been revived by Montaigne. 
Descartes had been content with a morale pro- 
visoire, inspired from Stoicism, which had never 
been followed up by the systematic ethical doc- 
trine of which it bore the promise. La Koche- 
foucauld, in spite of his intellectual likeness to 
Hobbes, and La Bruyere, could not be consid- 
ered as moralists in the philosophic sense of the 
word, being descriptive rather than dogmatic 
moralists. Pascal's profound defence of Chris- 
tianity as conceived by the disciples of Jansenius 
was still greatly influential in the French 
middle-class, particularly in the judiciary; but 
no doctrine could be more opposed to the ration- 
alistic tendencies of the age, and, while it was 



126 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

discredited by the superstitious demonstrations 
of the populace in its favor, ridiculed by public 
opinion, persecuted by the Jesuits and the gov- 
ernment, it had been controverted in the name 
of reason by Voltaire, in his Remarks on Pas- 
cal's 'Thoughts/ a supplement to his Lettres 
philosophiqms (1734). 

Diderot found in Shaftesbury what his abun- 
dant reading of Montaigne, Cicero, and Seneca 
had not given him : a complete system of ethics 
founded on reason and psychological experience, 
equally distant from the unsafe regions of 
mystic perfection and the severe heights of 
stoic virtue, yet apparently as consistent and 
satisfactory. 

"We are not lacking in moral treatises," he 
wrote in his Discours preliminaire (I, 11-12) ; 
"but no one yet has thought of giving us the 
elements of ethics. . . . The science of morals 
formed the main part of philosophy among the 
Ancients, who in this, I think, were much wiser 
than we are. From the way in which we treat 
that science, one might think either that it is 
less essential now for a man to know his duty, 
or that it is easier to fulfill it. A young man, 
on completing his course in philosophy, is 
thrown into a world of atheists, deists, Socinians, 



THE MORALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 127 

Spinozists, and other infidels; knowing much 
about the properties of the ' subtile matter ' and 
the formation of ' vortices/ a marvellous science 
which becomes perfectly useless to him; but 
hardly aware of the advantages of virtue except 
through what a tutor has told him, or of the 
foundations of his religion except through what 
he has read in his catechism. We must hope 
that those enlightened professors who have 
purged logic of the 'universals' and * cate- 
gories,' metaphysics of the ( entities ' and ' quid- 
dities,' and in physics substituted experiments 
and geometry for frivolous hypotheses, will be 
struck with this defect, and will not refuse to 
give ethics some of those patient labors which 
they devote to the public good. I shall be happy 
if this Essay finds a place in the multitude of 
materials which they will gather together." 

Diderot clearly perceived that a reform of 
ethical thought was a natural consequence of 
the new scientific spirit which had accom- 
plished so much, since the time when Bacon 
and Descartes had resolutely forsaken Scholastic 
philosophy. But, however sincerely he may 
have thought that his presentation of Shaftes- 
bury's system filled a great want in his country, 
there were two powers which, even with the best 
intentions, the philosopher could not neglect to 



128 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

consider while introducing the new ethics : those 
were, to use Shaftesbury's words, "that abom- 
inable blasphemous representation of church 
power" and that "worst of temporal govern- 
ments " which ruled the land. 4 In these two 
directions, Diderot could not be too cautious in 
his adaptation of intellectual novelties from 
England. He therefore carefully states, in his 
Preliminary Discourse, that the virtue he is 
about to discuss is only " moral virtue, that vir- 
tue which even the Fathers of the Church have 
granted to some heathen philosophers." He 
then proceeds to clear theism and "Mylord 
S * * *" of all suspicions of impiety, and to 
distinguish 5 the deist, "who believes in God 
but denies any revelation," from the theist, 
"who is near admitting revelation and already 
admits a God" (I, 13). Shaftesbury, he says, 
has very unjustly been ranked with the Asgils, 
Tindals, and Tolands, "bad Protestants and 
bad writers," whom Swift had so pleasantly 
derided in his Argument concerning the Abol- 
ishing of Christianity in England. The Inquiry 

4 Shaftesbury, Letters to a Young Man at the Uni- 
versity, Letter I. 

Comp. Shaftesbury's Moralists, in Charact. (ed. cit.), 
vol. II, 19. 



THE MOEALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 129 

is not directed against religion; what will be 
gained for the "God of nations" and for nat- 
ural religion will also be gained for the better 
knowledge of the God of Christians. 

After these rhetorical precautions, which in 
our freer times it is more easy than fair to con- 
demn, Diderot explains how he has written his 
paraphrase: "I have read over and over again 
Mylord S * * * , filled myself with his spirit, 
then closed his book, as it were, when I took up 
my pen." This is not literally true. 6 Diderot's 
work is practically a translation, which was 
certainly not written with the English original 
closed ; only, as he more truly proceeds to state, 
he has condensed what was lengthy, developed 
what appeared too concise, corrected what was 
but too boldly thought. A comparison of the 
two works fully proves that Diderot made a 
translation, but a free translation. 

For instance, here are specimens of English 
" boldness " as corrected by the French writer. 7 

'Critics generally have taken Diderot's words too 
much on trust in this matter (T. Fowler, Shaftesbury, 
p. 160; etc.). 

T In what follows, I quote from J. M. Eobertson's 
edition of the Characteristics, vol. I, and Diderot, (Euv., 
vol. I. 
10 



130 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

"Religion only excludes perfect atheism" 
(Shaft., p. 241) becomes: "Atheism alone ex- 
cludes all religion" (Did., p. 22). — Elsewhere 
(Shaft., p. 285), when too much seems to be 
said about the determining power of mere affec- 
tions in " animals," Diderot (p. 70) points out 
that only animals are meant, not human beings. 
— Or again, when the heroism of men who died 
to rid the world of tyrants is dwelt on (Shaft., 
p. 290), Diderot reminds us that this should be 
understood as referring to examples from ancient 
history only, and that of course the inviolability 
of kings is not in question (p. 74). — Again, 
when the English author commits himself to the 
statement that " the economy of the social affec- 
tions makes temporal happiness," Diderot takes 
good care (p. 77) to add a long paragraph re- 
serving the higher rights of the contemplative 
life. It was an easy thing, and even patriotic 
in a way, for the protestant Briton to inveigh 
against "absolute monarchs" and "pampered 
priests," not only of the past, but of his own 
time (Shaft., pp. 313, 316) ; while it is some- 
what pathetic to see the French philosopher 
draw on the Orient or antiquity for adequate 



THE MOKALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 131 

terms: "those opulent communities of idle 
dervishes" (Did., p. 97), "those sombre Ori- 
ental monarchs, those proud sultans,'' not ruled 
by love for their people, " but by a weakness for 
some vile creature," etc. (p. 100) ; and all allu- 
sions to a similar state of affairs in the present 
are eschewed. Even such veils thrown on a 
writer's meaning had become very transparent 
since Montesquieu's Persian Letters; but they 
were sufficient to save the situation, and keep the 
police away from the philosopher's door. 

It would be less interesting to give examples 
of the manner in which Diderot unravels his 
author's elaborate periods, cutting them up in 
short sentences, suppressing redundancies and 
tiresome ornaments, enlivening the style with 
questions, apostrophes, dialogues, and occasional 
developments of his own. The numerous foot- 
notes are but the overflow, as it were, of what 
he could not insert in the close woof of the argu- 
ment. They generally tend, as well as the 
additions in the text, to emphasize the con- 
demnation of atheism on the one hand, and of 
the persecuting spirit of bigotry on the other, 
to apologize for the much maligned influence of 



132 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

passions on human actions, and to tone down 
whatever might give offense to orthodoxy. 

The influence of Shaftesbury on Diderot's 
ethical speculations seems to have been lasting. 
Both considered the science of morals as much 
more important than metaphysics, right action 
and happiness as preferable to plausible intel- 
lectual speculation (Shaft., I, 189, 197; II, 
276 ; — Did., II, 257) ; both agreed in condemn- 
ing "enthusiasm" in its early meaning of 
religious fanaticism, and in praising it in its 
modern sense of a noble passion for action ;_ 
both were "intoxicated with the idea of Vir- 
tue," 8 and not only professed a secular kind of 
righteousness with great constancy, to the annoy- 
ance of ill-tempered critics, but were very 
really benevolent, and made their lives good 
illustrations of their precepts; lastly, both 
shared to an uncommon degree the traditional 
philosophic dislike for " all the anointed of the 
Lord, under any title whatsoever" (Did., II, 
289), and spared them only as much as was 
consistent with prudence. 

Yet Diderot was different from his English 

8 T. Fowler, op. cit., pp. 35-37. 



THE MORALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 133 

master in two respects: his heart was apt to 
grow more enthusiastic in the defence of virtue, 
while his mind, being more critical than that of 
Shaftesbury, better perceived the shortcomings 
of the cause which they had both undertaken to 
defend. Hence, although he took up the doc- 
trine of virtue as a necessary social fact with 
great fervor, and remained a good utilitarian 
always, he soon abandoned his weak plea for 
theism as a religion, and never was tempted to 
make optimism the foundation of his philosophy 
of life. He confesses somewhere (II, 345) that 
he had always thought it better to be a good 
man, un homme de bien, without ever being 
able to demonstrate the reason why. For, after 
all, if morality is not a social imposition, as 
Hobbes and his school would have it, if we can- 
not conceive of it as being merely the unex- 
plained will of God, as Locke chose to consider 
it, if it is truly founded on " the public good," 
as is taught by Shaftesbury, the question arises : 
"Where lies the public good?" Who shall 
decide wherein it consists, the fanatic or the 
philosopher (XI, 121) ? Socrates*or his judges ? 
The law and the Church of the kingdom of 
France, or Diderot? 



134 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Concerning this problem of the foundations 
of social ethics, Diderot seems to have resolved 
his doubt in two different manners. Scientific- 
ally, he gradually came to ascribe the origin of 
morality to the nature of man and the develop- 
ment of human societies, that is, he gave it a 
physical basis in a common organization and 
common needs: such a system of universal 
morality founded on nature is to be found in 
outline in an eloquent page of the Fragments 
from a Philosopher s Portfolio (1772). In this 
solution, he abandoned Shaftesbury's inneistic 
conception of the moral and the esthetic notions, 
and explained them by the experience of the 
individual living in society. Speculatively, he 
dreamt of perfect happiness in a very ideal state 
of society, not so much that blissful condition 
of innocent savages which he praised in his Sup- 
plement to Bougainville's Voyage, but a sort of 
Utopia in which both virtue and society would 
have so far harmonized as to become needless. 
In his old age, he wrote one day, referring to 
his early interest in Shaftesbury's Inquiry: 

"I was very young when it came into my 
head that the whole of ethics consisted in prov- 



THE MOKALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 135 

ing to men that, after all, in order to be happy, 
there was nothing better in this world to do 
than to be virtuous; I at once began to medi- 
tate on that question, and am still meditating it. 
"Shall I tell you a fine paradox? Well, I 
am convinced that there cannot be any real 
happiness for mankind except in a social state 
in which there would be no king, no magistrate, 
no priest, no laws, no thine or mine, no owner- 
ship of property, no vices or virtues; and that 
social state is the dickens of an ideal! That 
does not very well agree with the economic shop, 
does it?" (VI, 439). 

It certainly did not. But such a " fine para- 
dox," in the eighteenth century, could not be 
taken seriously, so harmless did it appear in its 
very enormity. After all, it was but a reminis- 
cence of Montaigne, 9 who was a great favorite 
of Diderot, as of many other honneies gens. 
Diderot courted greater danger indeed, when in 
1747 he published his Pensees philosophiques: 
they were sentenced by the Parliament of Paris, 
on July 7 of the same year, to be publicly burnt, 
as Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques had been 
thirteen years before. 

9 Essays, chapter on Cannibals, imitated by Shake- 
speare in Tempest, Act II, sc. 1. 



136 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

The Philosophic Thoughts of Diderot are 
said to have been written between Good Friday 
and Easter of 1747 (I, xlii). Such expedition 
should not be wondered at, when one considers 
that the dangerous volume in which Diderot, 
discarding circumlocution, openly defended 
deism and natural religion, was little else than 
a compilation of passages from Shaftesbury and 
a few others. This fact has not, to our knowl- 
edge, been pointed out before. Diderot sent to 
the press a collection of philosophic fragments, 
extracts, or " discoveries," out of his scrap-book. 
Probably encouraged by the way in which his 
paraphrase of the Inquiry had been received, 
he wished to try how the "bold thoughts" of 
the English moralist would fare in his age and 
country. The outcome must have answered his 
expectations: the Thoughts, persecuted by the 
judicial powers, were widely read by the public, 
anonymously reprinted by various publishers, 
and abundantly refuted. 

The main ideas in this book are to be found 
scattered throughout the Characteristics. Pas- 
sions are rehabilitated against the sweeping de- 
nunciations of theologians and moralists of the 



THE MOEALIST AND PHILOSOPHEB 137 

older schools ( Thoughts, I-V) . The evils caused 
by religious zeal, asceticism, superstition, are 
contrasted with the comparative harmlessness of 
atheism (Th., VI-XII). Atheism in turn is 
represented as more effectively confuted by 
deists — and by scientists, adds Diderot — than 
by the efforts of orthodoxy (Th., XIII-XIX) : 
God is proved by the very existence of mind, 
and by the harmony of nature (XX). Besides, 
deism, while less abhorrent to unbelievers than 
dogmatic theology, and more readily embraced 
by them, has decided advantages over atheism 
and scepticism in ethics (Th., XXIII). Scep- 
ticism is in a way necessary to attain belief, as 
long as it does not stop half-way, and rest con- 
tent with itself (Th., XXVIII-XXXVI). 
Negative atheism is to be pitied, doubting 
atheism can be brought over to belief (XXII). 
Miracles have ceased ; only fanatics and enthu- 
siasts are ready to believe in them at any time 
(Th., XLI-XLII, and XLVI). New religions 
are dangerous to a State, and to civilization 
itself, as was exemplified even by Christianity 
in its beginnings (Th., XLIII-XLIV). 10 Con- 

10 The great similarity between the Thoughts of Diderot 
and some Essays of Hume (1741-1742) on miracles and 



138 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

elusive evidence of the divine character of 
Scripture should not be derived from its literary 
worth, but from history and exegesis (XLV, 
LX). Both authors profess that they hold the 
faith of their national Church as well as any of 
the bigoted class who will attack them (LVIII). 

Some other suggestions in the Philosophic 
Thoughts are derived from Cicero, Saint Au- 
gustine, and Montaigne; others are prompted 
by the so-called Jansenistic miracles which were 
still agitating Paris, and found defenders among 
members of the Parliament; several of them 
advocate natural religion and that broader con- 
ception of God which Rousseau was going to 
make his own in the Profession of Faith of the 
Savoyard Vicar. Shaftesbury however seems 
to be by far the most considerable source of 
inspiration for Diderot at this time; and his 
influence is worth tracing a little more closely 
in this book. 

Atheism, the English philosopher had said, 
is less insulting to the Deity than superstition : 

the danger of new religions is not due to an influence of 
Hume on Diderot, but to a common inspiration from 
Shaftesbury, and a common reaction against the "mod- 
ern miracles' ' of Jansenism. 



I 



THE MORALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 139 

" For my own part, says honest Plutarch, I had 
rather men should say of me, That there neither 
is nor ever was such a one as Plutarch; than 
they should say, There was a Plutarch, an un- 
steady, changeable, easily provokable, and re- 
vengeful man, avOp&iros a/3e/3aio$, evfAeTafioXos, 
evxepfy irpte opyrjv, fAitcpoXviros, etc. (Plutarch, 
De Superstitione)." 11 — This was transcribed by 
Diderot in his Thought XII. In Shaftesbury, 
it was but a commonplace of English philosophy, 
being an echo of Francis Bacon (Essays, XVII, 
"On Superstition ") : 

" It were better to have no opinion of God at 
all than such an opinion as is unworthy of him ; 
for the one is unbelief, the other is contumely ; 
and certainly superstition is the reproach of the 
Deity. . . . Atheism leaves a man to sense, to 
philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputa- 
tion: all which may be guides to an outward 
moral virtue, though religion were not; but 
superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth 
an absolute monarchy in the minds of men: 
therefore atheism did never perturb states; for 
it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no 
further, and we see the times inclined to atheism 
(as the time of Augustus Caesar) were civil 
11 Shaftesbury, Charact., Enthusiasm (vol. I, p. 29, n.). 



140 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

times ; but superstition hath been the confusion 
of many states. ..." 

Shaftesbury distinguishes two kinds of athe- 
ists, one which absolutely denies and one which 
only doubts: "Now he who doubts may pos- 
sibly lament his own unhappiness and wish to 
be convinced. He who denies is daringly pre- 
sumptuous, and sets up an opinion against the 
interest of mankind and being of society." 12 — 
This is developed by Diderot as follows (Th., 
XXII) : " I distinguish three classes of atheists. 
Some tell you squarely that there is no God, and 
believe it : they are the true atheists ; a fairly 
large number, not knowing what to think of the 
question, would be willing to settle it by tossing 
a coin: they are the sceptical atheists; many 
more, wishing that there were no God, pretend 
to be convinced that such is the case, and live as 
though they were : they are the braggards of the 
party. ..." 

A certain kind of " primitive zeal," Shaftes- 
bury had said, does more harm than good to 
the religion which it designs to promote ; yet it 
has been exhibited with great success on the 
" Ibid., The Moralists (vol. II, p. 49). 



THE MOEALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 141 

public stage by Corneille in bis tragedy of 
Polyeucte. 1 3 — Diderot writes : " Polyeucte nowa- 
days would be notbing but a madman " (Th., 
XL). 

In connection witb tbat same zeal of early 
Christians against idolatry, Shaftesbury goes 
on to show bow grossly slandered the character 
of Julian, " that virtuous and gallant emperor," 
has been by his enemies; and he proves the 
"humour and genius" as well as the spirit of 
tolerance of " the Apostate " by quoting at great 
length from his Letter to the Bostrens (Julian's 
Epistles, ~No. 52), in which he bids the Gali- 
leans beware of raising any more commotions, 
and advises those who have remained faithful to 
the State religion to give them a good example 
of benevolence and kindness. — The vindication 
of Julian's character which Shaftesbury ap- 
pends to that quotation is transcribed by Diderot 
(the quotation and commentary constitute his 
Thought XLIII), yet in a condensed and 
pointed manner which is typical of the way in 
which the French philosopher used his English 
material. One might say that here the spirit 

19 Charact., Miscell. Reflections (vol. II, p. 210, n.). 



142 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

of Voltaire and his very manner turn the " Eng- 
lish boldness" into the greatest temerity. 
Shaftesbury had written: 14 " Thus the generous 
and mild emperor, whom we may indeed call 
heathen, but not so justly apostate, since being 
at different times of his youth transferred to 
different schools and universities, and bred 
under tutors of each religion, as well heathen as 
Christian, he happened, when of full age, to 
make his choice (though very unfortunately) in 
the former kind and adhered to the ancient reli- 
gion of his country and forefathers." — This 
moderate apology becomes, in Diderot : " Such 
were the sentiments of that prince, whom we 
may reproach with heathenism, but not apostasy : 
he spent the early years of his life under differ- 
ent masters, and in different schools ; and made, 
in a maturer age, an unfortunate choice: he 
unhappily made up his mind in favor of the 
form of worship of his ancestors, and the gods 
of his country." 

Passing over about a hundred pages of 
Shaftesbury's Miscellaneous Reflections, Di- 
derot alighted on another copious footnote, 

"Ibid, (vol. II, p. 212, n.). 



THE MORALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 143 

mostly made up of Latin quotations, concern- 
ing "the famed Gregorius, Bishop of Home," 15 
and " his inveterate hatred to ancient learning." 
This provided an easy transition from Thought 
XLIII to the following, by a contrast between 
the character of the emperor and that of the 
bishop : 

" What surprises me is, that the works of that 
learned emperor should have come down to us. 
They contain some traits which do no harm to 
the truth of Christianity, but which, being 
rather unfavorable to some Christians of his 
age, might have suffered from that particular 
attention with which the Fathers of the Church 
suppressed the works of their enemies. It was 
apparently from his predecessors that Saint 
Gregory the Great had inherited the barbarous 
zeal which animated him against letters and the 
arts. Had it only depended on that pontiff, we 
should now be in the same plight as the Mo- 
hammedans, whose whole reading is limited to 
their Alcoran. 16 For what might have been the 

^Charact., Miscell. Beflect. (vol. II, p. 303, n.). It is 
interesting to note that Rousseau made use of this same 
illustration of religious zeal, comparing Pope Gregory 
to Caliph Omar, in his Discourse on the Sciences and 
Arts (1750). 

"A reminiscence of another passage in the Miscell. 
Beflect. (vol. II, p. 301). 



144 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

fate of the ancient writers in the hands of a 
man who wrote solecisms out of religious prin- 
ciple, who fancied that to observe the rules of 
grammar was to make Jesus-Christ submit to 
Donatus, and who thought himself in duty 
bound to compass the ruin of antiquity?" 
(Th., XLIV). 

A critical edition of the Philosophic Thoughts 
would be needed to bring out the full extent of 
Diderot's indebtedness to Shaftesbury in that 
work. It may suffice here to give two more pas- 
sages (Th., XLV and LX), relating to the Bible, 
which are literally patchworks of extracts from 
Shaftesbury's Miscellany V (Chapters 1 and 
3), made more pointed and aggressive in their 
condensation : 

Thought XLV. — " However, the divine char- 
acter of Scripture is not so clearly imprinted on 
it, that the authority of the sacred historians 
may be absolutely independent from the testi- 
mony of profane authors. Where should we be, 
if we had to recognize God's hand in the form 
of our Bible ! How wretched the Latin version 
is! The originals themselves are not master- 
pieces of composition. The prophets, apostles, 
and evangelists have written as well as they 
knew. If we were allowed to consider the his- 
tory of the Hebrews simply as a production of 



THE MORALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 145 

the human mind, Moses and the writers who 
followed him would not rise above Livy, Sallust, 
Caesar, and Josephus, persons who surely are 
not suspected of writing under inspiration. Do 
we not prefer even Berruyer the Jesuit to 
Moses? In our churches, some pictures are 
preserved which we are assured were painted 
by angels, and even by the Deity : if such pieces 
were from the hand of Le Sueur, or Le Bran, 
what could I object to that immemorial tradi- 
tion ? Nothing at all, perhaps. But when, ob- 
serving those celestial works, I see the rules of 
painting violated at every step in the design 
and execution, the truth of art forsaken on all 
sides, if I am not allowed to suppose that the 
artist was an ignorant man, I must accuse the 
tradition of being a fable. How well I could 
apply the example of those paintings to the 
Scriptures, were I not aware that it matters 
very little whether their contents are well or 
ill expressed! The prophets claimed to speak 
true, not to speak well. Did the apostles die 
for anything but the truth of what they said or 
wrote ? Now, to return to my point, how very 
important it was to preserve pagan authors who 
could not fail to agree with the sacred writers, 
at least concerning the existence and miracles of 
Jesus-Christ, the qualities and character of 
Pontius Pilate, and the deeds and martyrdom 
of the early Christians ! " 17 

"It is a question whether Diderot, who somewhere 
boasts that he had been ''fed on the milk of Homer, 
11 



146 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Thought LX. — " You place before an infidel 
a volume of writings, the divine character of 
which you claim that you will demonstrate to 
him. But, before entering into an examination 
of your proofs, he will not fail to ask you some 
questions about that collection. Has it always 
been the same ? he will ask. Why is it not so 
large at present as it was a few centuries ago ? 
By what right has this or that book been ban- 
ished, which by another sect is venerated, and 
this or that other book preserved which that 
sect has rejected ? Upon what foundation have 
you preferred this manuscript? Who has led 
you in your choice among so many different 
copies, which are conclusive proofs that those 
sacred authors have not been transmitted to you 
in their original, primitive state of purity ? But 
if the ignorance of copyists or the malice of 
heretics have corrupted them, as you must agree, 
then you are compelled to restore them to their 
natural state, before you prove their divine char- 
acter ; for it is not on a collection of mutilated 
writings that your proofs will hold good, and 
my belief rest. Now, whom will you entrust 
Moses and the prophets/ ' was always so irresponsive as 
he here appears to be to the grandeur of the Biblical 
style. Here he simply echoes the classical banter of 
Shaftsbury, in Charaet., Miscell. V, Chap. 1 (vol. II, 
p. 301, on the style of the Bible; — p. 297, on those holy 
pictures which fall very far short of tl Raphael 's * ' 
standards; — p. 305, on the silence of history on Pontius 
Pilate), 



THE MOKALIST AND PHILOSOPHEB 147 

with that reform ? The Church. But I cannot 
agree to the infallibility of the Church before 
the divine nature of Scripture is proved to 
me. Thus I am in an unavoidable state of 
scepticism. 

" The difficulty can only be answered by 
acknowledging that the first foundations of the 
faith are purely human; that the selection 
among manuscripts, the restitution of passages, 
the collection itself was made according to some 
rules of criticism; and I am not unwilling to 
give to the divine character of the sacred books 
a degree of faith proportioned to the accuracy 
of those rules." 

So truly was Shaftesbury's mind a leading 
light for Diderot as he first entered the danger- 
ous path of philosophy, that reminiscences of the 
Characteristics are frequent in his other philo- 
sophic works of this and later periods. 

In The Sceptic s Walk, which was seized by 
the police among Diderot's papers shortly after 
its composition (1747), and only published in 
1830, the general frame, an introductory narra- 
tive mixed with dialogue, bears a fairly close 
resemblance to the opening pages of The Moral- 
ists. 18 The " genteel " character and enlightened 
18 Charact, vol. II, pp. 3 ff. 



148 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

mind of "Ariste," as well as the benevolent, 
humane scepticism of "Cleobule," prepare the 
reader for some such moral disquisitions as the 
English "Palemon," "Philocles," and " Theo- 
cles" were wont to indulge in, amidst rural 
surroundings which owed more to nature than 
to art. A spirit of wide toleration, and a free 
use of reason to test all human beliefs, are the 
distinguishing features of those philosophic 
characters. But, while Philocles and his friends 
discourse concerning the true, the good, and the 
beautiful in the abstract, in a Platonic manner, 
Ariste and Cleobule are concerned with the more 
immediate realities of religion and government : 
" Shall I dare ask you," says the former, " why 
religion and government are subjects on which 
we are forbidden to write ? If truth and justice 
can only gain by my examination, it is ridicu- 
lous to forbid me to examine" (I, 181). Thus 
the bolder Diderot; whereas the wiser Diderot 
thinks, with Cleobule : "I do not blame you for 
endeavoring to enlighten men ; it is the greatest 
service one can propose to render them, but it is 
the service also which will never be rendered to 
them. . . . Ariste, you have to deal not only 



THE MORALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 149 

with people who know nothing, but with people 
who will not know anything. . . . Eeligion and 
government are sacred subjects which one is not 
allowed to touch. Those who stand at the helm 
of the Church and State would be sorely embar- 
rassed if they had to give us a good reason for 
the silence which they impose upon us ; but the 
safest thing is to obey and keep silent, unless 
we have found, up in the air, some fixed point 
beyond the reach of their bolts, from which we 
can announce the truth to them." 

For want of such an aerial stronghold, Ariste, 
who insists on publishing a certain discourse of 
his friend's, must be prepared for the outcry of 
all the defenders of "artificial theology," as 
Bolingbroke used to say, against reason and 
natural religion. " Methinks I live in the times 
of Paul, at Ephesus," says Cleobule, echoing 
Shaftesbury, 19 "and that I hear the priests 
repeating on all sides the clamors that were 
formerly raised against him. 'If that man is 
right/ those relic-dealers will cry, ' our traffic is 
at an end, we have nothing to do but shut up 
our shops and starve.' " 

Ariste-Diderot foresees these objections, of a 
"Charact., Miscell. Beflect. (vol. II, p. 208). 



150 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

commercial rather than metaphysical order, as 
clearly as Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke had 
done before him. 20 Yet it is his ambition " to 
write a good book, and avoid persecution." 
Cleobule's banter concerning that sort of " good 
books" brings us back by degrees to Shaftes- 
bury's celebrated apology for the use of ridicule 
as a test of truth : " A sure means of gratifying 
your taste, without irritating anyone, would be 
to compose a long historical, dogmatical, crit- 
ical dissertation, which nobody would read and 
which the superstitious could afford to leave 
unanswered. You would have the honor of 
resting on the same shelf with John Huss, Socin, 
Zwingle, Luther, and Calvin, and in a year's 
time people would hardly remember that you 
ever wrote. Whereas if you take up the tone of 
Bayle, Montaigne ,Voltaire, Barclay, Woolston, 
Swift, or Montesquieu, you will doubtless run 
the risk of living longer; but how dear that ad- 
vantage will cost you!" (I, 185). Whereupon 
Ariste asks, almost in Shaftesbury's own words, 
" why theologians are hostile to humor ? 21 It is 

30 Bolingbroke, Letter to Mr. Pope. 
21 Charaet., Enthusiasm (vol. I, p. 10) ; — On the Free- 
dom of Wit and Humour (vol. I, p. 47, and passim). 



THE MOEALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 151 

certain that nothing is more useful than good 
raillery, and it seems to me that nothing is more 
harmless than bad raillery. To apply ridicule 
wrongly is like breathing on a looking-glass. 
The vapor of your breath vanishes of itself, and 
the crystal becomes bright again. In truth, 
those grave gentlemen must either be bad humor- 
ists, or be ignorant that the true, the good, and 
the beautiful are not susceptible of ridicule, or 
harbor a great suspicion that these latter quali- 
ties are foreign to them." 

The kind of philosophic satire in which Di- 
derot indulges in the remainder of The Sceptic s 
Walk, where he depicts under the transparent 
veils of a somewhat tedious allegory the reli- 
gious people, the people of the world, and the 
various kinds of philosophers, in their respective 
paths of "Thorns," "Flowers," and "Chestnut- 
trees," is certainly not in the spirit of Shaftes- 
bury, whose manner never was so bold. It was 
easy for a Shaftesbury or a Bolingbroke, Eng- 
lish gentlemen of high station, with a natural 
inclination for some form of compromise even 
in their most radical free-thinking, to keep a 
certain reserve when they came to touch upon 



152 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

civil and religious establishments, and to hold 
that some sort of worship should be maintained, 
at least for the rabble. 22 But Diderot was not 
restrained by any scruples or political consider- 
ations. Besides, as Leslie Stephen has rightly 
remarked, conditions were very different in 
England and France. "In England, the ra- 
tional Protestant could meet the deist half way. 
The line of demarcation was shifting and un- 
certain, and it is hard to say in many cases 
whether the old traditional element, or the 
modern rationalising element, predominates. 
Persecution would be anomalous between sects 
so faintly discriminated. In Catholic France a 
rigid and unbending system was confronted by 
a thoroughgoing scepticism. Men of intellect 
could find no halfway resting-place, and could 
disguise their true sentiments with no shreds of 
orthodox belief. What passed for Christianity 

22 Bolingbroke, Letter to Mr. Pope (1753 ed., p. 486) : 
Between excessive free-thinking and a tyrannical reli- 
gious zeal, ' ' is there no middle path, in which a reason- 
able man and a good citizen may direct his steps?' ' — 
And Shaftesbury (Charact., vol. I, p. 14), quoting 
Harrington: " 'Tis necessary a people should have a 
public leading in religion. "— It is well known that both 
Voltaire and Hume held a similar theory. 



THE MORALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 153 

in England would have been rank heresy in 
France; and thus the Catholic Church, unable 
to come to terms with the rationalists, met them 
by a free use of the weapons of authority." 23 
Diderot's use of ridicule, in The Sceptic's Walk, 
would surely have involved him in very serious 
difficulties with the defenders of the established 
faith if he had been rash enough to publish what 
he had had the boldness to write. But he never 
was able to recover his manuscript from the 
hands of the police. 

In the same year 1747 he wrote a short work 
on The Sufficiency of Natural Religion, which 
affects the mathematical form of demonstration 
used by Clarke and Wollaston 24 on the same 
subject. He resembles more the latter than the 
former, in that he does not concern himself with 
vindicating the Christian religion together with 
the religion dictated by nature and reason. On 
the contrary, Christianity is only introduced in 
order to show that the natural religion is of 
greater " sufficiency " and excellence, and should 
supersede it. 

28 Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the 
eighteenth century, Chap. II, § 13. 

24 Clarke, Boyle Lectures, 1704-1705; Wollaston, The 
Religion of Nature delineated, 1722. 



154 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

The Letter on the Blind, for the use of those 
who see, published in 1749, caused the arrest 
and imprisonment of Diderot; not so much 
because of its contents, which seem to have been 
but little considered or understood, as because 
of a disparaging remark concerning the eyes 
of Mme Dupre de Saint-Maur, a friend of 
D'Argenson, then Minister of War. This book 
may be said to be the last in which Diderot the 
moralist and philosopher tried to express his 
opinions with some degree of freedom. The 
treatment which he received as a consequence of 
its publication could have been much more 
severe; but it sufficed to make him vividly mind- 
ful of " the history and persecutions of the men 
who had the misfortune of finding the truth in 
ages of darkness, and the imprudence of reveal- 
ing it to their blind contemporaries" (I, 290). 
The ideas which must have appeared most ob- 
noxious to the orthodox in the Letter on the 
Blind, and which served as a pretext to D' Argen- 
son not only to avenge his lady friend, but also 
to "pay his court and show himself a great 
minister," 25 were not the theories relating to 

25 Such is the view of the matter taken by his brother, 
the Marquis d'Argenson, in his Memoirs (August, 1749). 



THE MOEALIST AND PHILOSOPHEE 155 

the psychological experiments on the blind sug- 
gested to Locke by Molyneux, 26 performed by 
Cheselden, and discussed by Voltaire. Diderot 
had dared go further, and, starting from the 
principle that " the state of our organs and our 
senses has a great deal of influence on our meta- 
physics and ethics" (I, 288-289), he conceived 
that "that great proof (of God's existence) de- 
rived from the wonders of nature is very weak 
for blind people." Yet, as he could not very 
well demonstrate this proposition without incur- 
ring the risk of being assailed by "certain 
people, who make a crime of everything," he 
came to his paradox in a roundabout manner, by 
introducing in his Letter a famous professor of 
mathematics who was blind, Nicholas Saun- 
derson. 

Thus, after timidly expounding rationalistic 
ethics in a free translation of Shaftesbury, then 
rational religion in anonymous quotations from 
the Characteristics and demonstrations in the 

28 The ' ' problem of Molyneux ' ' had first been proposed 
and discussed by Locke, in his Essay concerning Human 
Understanding (1690), Book II, Chap. IX (Of Percep- 
tion), §§ 8-10, " Ideas of sensation often changed by the 
judgment. " 



156 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

manner of Wollaston, Diderot now proceeded 
to criticize the main argument of both deism 
and revealed religion in favor of God's exist- 
ence, yet still under the guise of " English bold- 
ness." But, on this last occasion, the mask of 
foreign authority was, with the exception of one 
more reminiscence from Shaftesbury, entirely 
fictitious. The " land of thinkers " here served 
the same purpose as Montesquieu's Persia, or 
other geographical fictions of eighteenth-century 
philosophers: it was merely a shield against 
persecution; England was a sort of unaccount- 
able land of heresy and free-thinking for the 
productions of which a French writer should 
not be held responsible when he translated them. 
Nicholas Saunderson, or Sanderson, born in 
1682, had lost his sight when he was but twelve 
months old. He succeeded however in becoming 
very proficient in mathematics ; in 1707 he went 
to Cambridge, and taught classes in Newtonian 
philosophy, particularly in hydrostatics, me- 
chanics, acoustics, astronomy, the science of 
tides, and optics. In 1711 he succeeded 
Whiston, who had been expelled from the Uni- 
versity. Lord Chesterfield, who attended some 



THE MOBALIST AND PHILOSOPHEE 157 

of his courses from 1712 to 1714, described him 
as a professor without eyes who taught others 
how to use their own. He died April 19, 1739. 
The following year his Algebra 27 was published, 
with a Memoir of his Life and Character by 
his friends, Dr Thomas ISTettleton, Dr Richard 
Wilkes, the Rev. J. Boldero, the Rev. Gervas 
Holmes, the Rev. Granville Wheeler, and Dr 
Richard Davies. In 1751 appeared his Method 
of Fluxions applied to a Select Number of Use- 
ful Problems. 

Diderot declares (I, 304) that he had looked 
through Saunderson's Elements of Algebra, 
with the hope of finding there what he wanted 
to learn concerning the metaphysics of the blind, 
from those who had known the famous professor 
intimately and acquainted us with some par- 
ticulars of his life. But his curiosity had been 
disappointed. He thought that elements of 
geometry by the blind mathematician would 
have been a work more singular in itself and 
more interesting to us. His definitions of lines, 

27 The Elements of Algebra, in ten books, by Nicholas 
Saunderson, LL.D., 2 vols, Camb., 1740. — Translated into 
French by M. de Joncourt, Elemens d'Algebre de M. 
Saunderson . . ., 2 vols, Paris, 1756. 



158 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

points, surfaces, angles, would have been based 
on very abstract metaphysical notions, some- 
what resembling those of subjective idealism, 
"an extravagant system which, I think, could 
owe its birth to blind men only," yet a system 
which, "to the shame of the human mind arid 
philosophy, is the most difficult to combat, 
although the most absurd of all." 28 

But, to return to the point from which our 
philosopher had been wandering, what might 
be Saunderson' s theology ? He was said to have 
been a man of outspoken opinions in general, 29 
— possibly a deist. But the Memoir of his Life 
gave an edifying account, on the whole, of his 
attitude towards religion : 

"It would be thought an omission in these 
Memoirs of the Life of Dr Saunderson, if no 
notice were taken of the manner in which he 
resigned it. The Beverend Mr Gervas Holmes 
informed him, that the mortification gained so 
much ground that his best friends could enter- 
tain no hopes of his recovery. He received this 
notice of his approaching death with great 

28 In The Sceptic's Walk (I, 218-219), Diderot had 
attempted a rather weak refutation of Berkeley's im- 
inaterialism. 

28 Diet, of National Biogr., ' { Saunderson. ' ' 



THE MOEALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 159 

calmness and serenity, and after a short silence, 
resumed life and spirits, and talked with as 
much composure of mind as he had ever done 
in his most sedate hours of perfect health. He 
appointed the evening of the following day to 
receive the sacrament with Mr Holmes; but 
before that came, he was seized with a delirium, 
which continued to his death." 30 

Here also Diderot must have been "disap- 
pointed." His imagination then supplied what 
the book did not give him, and he wrote a sequel, 
or complement, concerning the last moments of 
Saunderson, in an original manner that was to 
be characteristic of some of his best works later 
on. 31 Like his favorite Montaigne, he de- 
lighted to make his reading a matter for inde- 
pendent thought and composition; and, like 
Montaigne again, he " busied himself with form- 
ing rather than dissipating clouds, and with 
suspending judgments rather than with judg- 
ing" (I, 369-370). But this undogmatic man- 
ner of thinking merely for the sake of thinking, 

80 Saunderson, Elements of Algebra, vol. I, p. xix. 

81 For instance, D'Alembert's Dream, based on a con- 
versation, probably not imaginary; the Supplement to 
Bougainville's Voyage, and Jacques le Fataliste, inspired 
by books which Diderot had read; etc. 



160 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

and this sceptical enjoyment of an argument for 
its intrinsic logic rather than for its practical 
value, are not to everybody's taste: Diderot 
must have been amused at the wrath which was 
excited in England, and particularly in the 
Royal Society, by a mystification which turned 
Saunderson into a champion of atheism. 32 

Being very sorry that he could derive so little 
interesting information from the Memoir on 
Saunderson, — " those who lived with him must 
have been most unphilosophic people I" (I, 
312) — Diderot claimed to have drawn a better 
account of Saunderson' s death from a book by 
his disciple, Mr William Inchliff, 33 printed in 
1747 in Dublin with this title, given in English 
by the French philosopher, for more verisimili- 
tude: The Life and Character of Dr Nicholas 
Saunderson, late Lucasian Professor of the 
Mathematics in the University of Cambridge; 
by his disciple and friend William Inchliff, Esq. 

82 J. Morley, Diderot . . ., vol. I, p. 91. 

33 Or ' ' Hinchliff , ' ' which is the same thing to French 
ears. There has been a J. E. Hinchliff, sculptor (1777- 
1867), and a John Hinchliffe, bishop of Peterborough 
(1731-1794) ; but there is no record left of the English- 
man whose patronymic Diderot borrowed in 1749. 



THE MOEALIST AND PHILOSOPHEK 161 

Barring the fictitious " Inchliff," the date, and 
the place, all is transcribed from the title-page 
of the Elements of Algebra. And this is how 
Diderot imagines Saunderson's last conversa- 
tion, which never took place, with the Rev. 
Gervas Holmes (I, 307 ff.) : 

" When he was on the point of death, a very 
learned clergyman, Mr Gervaise Holmes, was 
called to his bedside; they had a conversation 
concerning the existence of God, of which some 
fragments remain that I am going to translate 
for you as best I may, for they are well worth 
the trouble. The minister began by objecting to 
him the wonders of nature : i Hey, Sir/ said the 
blind philosopher, ' leave all that beautiful spec- 
tacle which was never made for me! I have 
been condemned to spend my life in darkness; 
and you talk to me of prodigies which I do not 
understand, and which are proofs only for you 
and those who see like you. If you wish me to 
believe in God, you must make me touch him.' 

— " i Sir,' the minister cleverly replied, ' feel 
yourself with your own hands, and you will find 
the Deity in the wonderful mechanism of your 
organs.' 

— "'Mr Holmes," said Saunderson, 'I tell 
you again, all that is not so fine for me as it is 
for you. But, were the animal mechanism as 
wonderful as you claim it is, and as I am willing 
to believe, for you are an honest gentleman, 
12 



162 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

quite incapable of imposing upon me, what has 
it in common with a supremely intelligent being ? 
If it surprises you, that is perhaps because you 
are in the habit of treating as a prodigy what- 
ever seems to you beyond your strength. I have 
attracted from the remotest parts of England 
people who could not conceive how I studied 
geometry: you must acknowledge that those 
people had no very distinct notions about the 
possibility of things. Is a certain phenomenon, 
according to us, above man ? we say at once, It 
is the work of a God; our vanity is not content 
with less. Might we not put a little less pride 
in our talk, and a little more philosophy? If 
nature offers us some knot hard to untie, let us 
leave it for what it is ; and let us not, in order 
to cut it, resort to the hand of a being which 
afterwards turns out to be another knot even 
more difficult to untie than the first. Ask an 
Indian why the world remains suspended in the 
air, he will reply that it is carried on the back 
of an elephant; and on what will he rest the 
elephant? on a tortoise; and the tortoise, who 
will support it? . . . That Indian seems piti- 
able to you ; yet one might say to you as to him : 
Mr Holmes, my good friend, confess your igno- 
rance first of all, and spare me the elephant and 
the tortoise.' " 

This "elephant and tortoise" illustration, 
used against the obscurum per obscurius way of 



THE MORALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 163 

reasoning, had been first introduced by Locke, 
in his criticism of the idea of substance (Essay 
concerning Human Understanding, Bk. II, Ch. 
13, § 19,— and again Ch. 23, §2). It had been 
further developed by his disciple Shaftesbury 
(CharacL, The Moralists, vol. II, p. 15), to 
criticize the solutions given to the problem of 
the origin of evil. From Shaftesbury Diderot 
appears to have taken both the idea and the illus- 
tration, in § XXII of his Sufficiency of Natural 
Religion, where he boldly applies to the story of 
Adam the ridicule which Shaftesbury seemed 
to cast on the myth of Prometheus only. In 
that instance Diderot had ascribed the elephant 
and tortoise theory to a " Chinois " ; here he 
reverted to the original " Indian." 

To Diderot's criticism of the cosmological 
proof of God's existence, Voltaire retorted that 
he " did not at all agree with Saunderson, who 
denied God because he happened to have been 
born blind" (Letter to Diderot, June, 1749). 
But this answer does not dispose of the whole 
argument. Diderot meant to show the weakness 
of reasoning from the data of our senses in such 
a weighty subject, and, as he had done in his 



164 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Philosophic Thoughts, to point out the trifling 
value of wonders or miracles where a rational 
proof would serve the purpose much better. 
Shaftesbury had asserted that "the contempla- 
tion of the universe, its laws and government, 
was the only means which could establish the 
sound belief of a Deity. For what though in- 
numerable miracles from every part assailed the 
sense and gave the trembling thought no respite ? 
... To whom the laws of this universe and its 
government appear just and uniform, to him 
they speak the government of one Just One; 
to him they reveal and witness a God. . . ." 
Revelation and miracles may afterwards con- 
firm this belief in a just and true being, but the 
existence of such a being " no power of miracles, 
nor any power besides his reason, can make him 
know or apprehend." 34 In this Diderot partly 
follows, and partly disagrees with, his master: 
after denying with him the power of miracles 
to convince reason (Philosophic Thoughts, L), 
he now tried to show against him how unphilo- 
sophic and inconclusive the sense of wonder was 

84 Shaftesbury, Charact., The Moralists (vol. II, pp. 
91-92). 



THE MOEALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 165 

even in relation to the normal state of the uni- 
verse. Was it such a wonderful order after all ? 
Was not the world full of evils and imperfec- 
tions which only the systematic optimist chose 
to ignore? When we admire the arrangement 
of our world, and claim that its final cause is the 
happiness of mankind, are we not like ants and 
worms dwelling among heaps of earth and 
refuse in some back garden, and marvelling at 
the intelligent benevolence of the gardener who 
has arranged all those materials for them? 35 
Diderot, as we have already seen, had from the 
beginning taken exception at Shaftesbury's 
philosophic optimism. He was now led to find 
that, without an implicit faith in the perfect 
order of the world, it was difficult to uphold the 
deistic belief that the universe was " not a self- 
governed but a God-governed machine." 36 The 
vacillation evinced in 1747 in The Sceptic's 
Walk disappears in 1749 in the Letter on the 

85 Thus ' l Atheos ' ' had answered the arguments of the 
deist (then identical with Diderot) in the "Path of 
Chestnut-Trees ' ' (§§ 33-36) ; and his case had been made 
out rather strong against the celebrated metaphor of the 
1 i Watchmaker. ' ' 

36 Shaftesbury, Charact., The Moralists (vol. II, p. 93). 



166 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Blind. The scientific attitude replaces the 
deist's natural religion; Shaftesbury gives way 
to Lucretius; and, where English Deism and 
Voltaire rested satisfied, Diderot evolves, in 
Saunderson's parting words, the first outline of 
a theory of the universe which is identical with 
that of modern transformism. 

Admitting, upon the word of Newton, Leib- 
nitz, Clarke, and honest Mr Holmes, that there 
is a wonderful order in that universe which his 
eyes had never seen, Saunderson goes on to say 
(I, 309) : 

" I yield to you concerning the present state 
of the universe, on condition that you will allow 
me the liberty to think what I please about its 
ancient, original state, concerning which you are 
not less blind than I. Here you have no wit- 
nesses to oppose to me, and your eyes are of no 
avail. Imagine then, if you wish, that the order 
which strikes you has existed always; but let 
me believe that it is not so, and that if we went 
back to the birth of things and ages, if we felt 
matter moving and chaos assuming shape, we 
should meet with a multitude of shapeless beings 
against a few well-organized creatures. If I 
have nothing to object to you about the present 
condition of things, I may at least ask you 
about their past condition. I may for instance 



THE MORALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 167 

ask you, who told you, and Leibnitz, Clarke, and 
Newton, that when animals were first formed, 
some were not without heads, and some without 
feet ? I may assert that some had no stomachs, 
others no bowels; that those creatures which, 
having a stomach, palate and teeth, seemed 
likely to endure, have ceased to exist, because 
of some defect in the heart or lungs; that 
monsters have successively been destroyed ; that 
all defective combinations of matter have disap- 
peared, and that only those remained in which 
the mechanism implied no important contradic- 
tion, which could subsist by their own means 
and perpetuate themselves." 

These ideas, it must be remembered, offered 
nothing that appeared very striking to eight- 
eenth-century thinkers. To us, they are like a 
prophetic view of biological theories that have 
revolutionized modern science; and we shall 
endeavor to consider them in their proper scien- 
tific aspect in the next chapter. For Voltaire 
and his contemporaries, and even for Villemain 
as late as 1828, they were but a development, a 
sort of reboiling, of the most ancient material- 
istic system of the universe, the physics of 
Epicurus expounded by Lucretius in his poem 
De Rerum Natura. They meant little more 



168 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

than that Diderot, after having for a .time de- 
fended rational ethics and rational religion on 
the same grounds as the English deists, had dis- 
covered that the foundations of natural religion 
were as undemonstrable, rationally, as those of 
the revealed religions, and that he had no other 
alternative than to fall back upon that least un- 
satisfactory system of materialism which for 
ages past had been adopted by the most radical 
free-thinkers, though not yet indorsed by scien- 
tists. Concerning the origin of the universe 
and life, the choice lay between the Biblical 
account of Creation and the hypotheses of the 
Atomistic School, between Genesis and the six 
books of the De Berwn Natura; concerning the 
present order of the world, between the belief in 
Providence and final causes, and the faith in a 
mechanical universe governed by scientific laws. 
While Voltaire refused to abandon deism and 
creationism, yet pointed out many objections to 
the belief in Providence, finality, and optimism, 
Diderot declared his preference for the Lucre- 
tian solutions, denying creation, final causes, and 
Providence, declaring God " unknowable " scien- 
tifically, and limiting his philosophy, long be- 



THE MOEALIST AND PHILOSOPHEE 169 

fore Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, to 
the knowledge of positive reality, the observation 
of phenomena and the investigation of their 
laws. The two letters of Voltaire and Diderot 
concerning the Letter on the Blind illustrate in 
a significant manner the parting of the ways not 
only between their authors, but between the two 
generations of French philosophers which be- 
long to the first and the second half of the eigh- 
teenth century. They also mean a final separa- 
tion between Diderot's philosophy and English 
deism. 

That he was not, however, a systematic mate- 
rialist is shown by the fact that he no longer 
concerned himself with advancing the philos- 
ophy of mechanism or atomism in the abstract, 
or in shaping a metaphysical theory of his own. 
This task he left to Helvetius, Holbach, and 
Naigeon ; the last two soon engaged in translat- 
ing the most audacious English works, written 
earlier in the century by Toland, Tindal, and 
others, for the promotion of systematic atheism. 
The " fury of systematizing " did not appeal to 
Diderot, and he criticized the weak points in 
the materialistic arguments of Helvetius with as 



170 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

much independence as lie had done those of the 
English deists. If we apply to him Comte's 
division of the intellectual ages of mankind, 
we may say that before 1745 he had already 
passed the " theological age " ; between 1745 and 
1749, he lived through his " metaphysical age " ; 
and in 1750 he entered the "positive age," re- 
solving to confine himself to the study of nature, 
believing with Locke that nothing could be 
known except through the senses, and with 
Bacon that the investigation of nature was the 
most useful task of all. 

He had in this metaphysical period devoted 
enough attention to philosophic speculation to 
find it as unsatisfactory in its results as it was 
dangerous to his life and liberty. His thought 
during those few years may be said to have been 
dominated, though not in any sense ruled, by 
the influence of English philosophy, and par- 
ticularly of Shaftesbury. The Characteristics, 
as they directed his attention to the problem of 
morality, at the same time trained his mind in 
abstract reflections on the nature of art and of 
the beautiful, and thus were not an inconsider- 
able factor in the formation of his esthetic criti- 



THE MORALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 171 

cism. Furthermore, one may find the sug- 
gestion at least of his last philosophic work, 
the Essay on the reigns of Claudius and 
Nero, in a footnote of the Characteristics which 
outlined an apology for Seneca, as "mitigator 
and moderator" of Nero's tyranny, "an able 
minister, and honest courtier," and pointed out 
the source of current prejudices against the 
Eoman philosopher in the writings of "that 
apish shallow historian and court flatterer, 
Dion Cassius." 37 

What high regard Diderot always preserved 
for Shaftesbury, even long after he had lost his 
early enthusiasm for the "divine anchorite," 
will appear from the parallel which he drew 
between him and Locke, in the article " Genie " 
of the Encyclopedie {(Euv., XV, 39) : 

" The true and the false, in philosophic pro- 
ductions, are not the distinguishing characters 
of genius. There are very few errors in Locke, 
and too few truths in Mylord Shaftesbury : the 

87 Shaftesbury, Charact., Miscell. Reflect, (vol. II, p. 
169, n.). Diderot's apology for Seneca seems also to 
owe something to Montaigne's Essais, Liv. II, ch. 32, 
"Defence de Seneque et de Plnta^iae." 



172 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

former however is nothing but a comprehensive, 
penetrating, precise intellect; and the latter is 
a genius of the first rank. Locke saw ; Shaftes- 
bury created, constructed, edified: to Locke we 
owe great truths perceived in a frigid manner, 
methodically followed up, drily announced; to 
Shaftesbury, brilliant systems often lacking in 
sound foundations, yet full of sublime truths; 
and, in his moments of error, he still pleases and 
persuades by the charms of his eloquence." 

Before he left Shaftesbury, Clarke, Wollas- 
ton, and all deistic systems, before he abandoned 
the ungrateful task of framing beliefs which 
could not satisfactorily be demonstrated but 
only raised new doubts, Diderot had not lost 
sight of scientific research and theory, for 
which he had had a great inclination since his 
youth. From the first, even in metaphysics, he 
had been a realist; thus he could not suffer 
Berkeley's subjective idealism, while he felt all 
the force of its demonstrations, and he always 
was more or less irritated by the amoralism of 
Hobbes and Mandeville, although it was the 
logical consequence of a materialism to which he 
was not averse. From Shaftesbury, for whom 
he always entertained a sort of veneration, 



THE MOEALIST AND PHILOSOPHER 173 

through Locke's philosophy of sensation, in 
which his faith never wavered, he worked his 
way back, as it were, to the fountain-head of 
English philosophy and the father of positivistic 
thought, Francis Bacon. 



CHAPTEK IV 

THE SCIENTIST 

" Devote yourselves to metaphysics as much 
as you please; as for me, I am a physicist and 
a chemist" (II, 66). Thus wrote Diderot in 
1770, at the end of a period of scientific work 
which had occupied more than twenty years of 
his life. 

Just as, in the deistic phase of his thought, he 
had shared Shaftesbury's dislike for "enthu- 
siasm," meaning the unreasoning impulses of 
fanaticism, so in philosophy he had early pro- 
fessed the same contempt as the author of the 
Characteristics for all metaphysical systems 
and their authors. In a remarkable passage of 
the Bijoux Indiscrets, he had depicted, under 
the guise of a vision (Reve de Mangogul) , the 
downfall of all the systems of ontology at the 
apparition of the giant child called Experience. 
" The most ingenious way of becoming foolish 
is by a system," 1 Shaftesbury had said; and 

1 Char act., Advice to an Author, p. iii, sect. 1. In 
Miscell., Y, Shaftesbury disposes of Oartesianism in his 
usual tone of banter. 

174 



THE SCIENTIST 175 

the word " systematic " was used by him and his 
followers as characterizing speculations as bar- 
ren as those of Aristotle and the Scholastics, 
didactic constructions in which an outward ap- 
pearance of order and logic served as a vain 
cloak to ideas that had no relation to experience. 
Shaftesbury also described systematic thinkers, 
that is, all kinds of metaphysicians, as " a sort 
of moon-blind wits who, though very acute and 
able in their kind, may be said to renounce day- 
light and extinguish, in a manner, the bright 
visible outside world, by allowing us to know 
nothing besides what we can prove by strict and 
formal demonstration." 2 

As Locke's experimental philosophy had 
gained ground in England, then in France, and 
" natural philosophy," or science, had constantly 
grown in favor, constructive metaphysics had 
lost more and more credit everywhere. Des- 
cartes's attempt at solving the riddle of the 
universe by the method of mathematics had 
been followed by the systems of Malebranche, 
Spinoza, and Leibnitz, which, because they 
appealed to pure reason, and not at all to experi- 

2 Charact, Miscell., IV, Chapt. II. 



176 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

ence, had made the a priori method of reasoning 
unpopular, and brought down a great deal of 
undeserved obloquy upon Cartesianism. In the 
latter half of the seventeenth century, Rational- 
ism had inspired philosophers and scientists 
alike, but divergences existed between the spirit 
of metaphysical, a priori Eationalism and the 
spirit of the experimental, a posteriori school, 
which sometimes had brought them into a sort 
of conflict. For instance, Spinoza and Leibnitz, 
though they admired the work of the English 
Royal Society, thought that Boyle was taking 
needless trouble in attempting to demonstrate 
experimentally that the "substantial forms" 
and " qualities " of bodies, i. e., their properties, 
were effects of the order and movement of their 
particles: what need was there of such proofs, 
when the fact had been rationally demonstrated 
by Bacon and Descartes ? " . . . Nescio cur 
Clar. Vir hoc adeo sollicite conetur colligere ex 
hoc suo experimento; cum jam hoc a Verulamio 
et postea a Cartesio satis superque demonstratum 
sit" (Spinoza to Oldenburg, Oct. 21, 1661) . And 
Leibnitz (Nouveaux Essais, L.IY, Ch. 12, § 13) : 
"M, Boyle s'arrete un peu trop, pour dire la 



THE SCIENTIST 177 

verite, a ne tirer d'une infinite de belles experi- 
ences d'autre conclusion que celle qu'il pourrait 
prendre pour principe, savoir, que tout se fait 
mecaniquement dans la nature; principe qu'on 
peut rendre certain par la seule raison, et jamais 
par les experiences, quelque nombre qu'on en 
fasse." 3 Matters bad grown worse, if we may 
say so, between tbe metaphysical and the ex- 
perimental rationalists, when from the criti- 
cism of the "secondary qualities" of matter, 
which stood in the way of science as well as 
philosophy, Berkeley had proceeded to criticize 
rationally and reduce to naught the "primary 
qualities," concluding with a system of imma- 
terialism which, as we have seen, confounded 
and irritated Diderot by its appearance of irre- 
fragable evidence. 

It is hardly to be wondered at, that, in the 
general reaction against all ontological systems 
which characterized the eighteenth century, 
while Locke was highly praised and Berkeley 
ridiculed, not the slightest attention was paid 
to the most remarkable philosophy produced in 

'Quoted by Ch. Adam, PMlosophie de Fr. Bacon, 
Paris, 1890, p. 332, n. 2. 
13 



178 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

that age, the Phenomenism of Hume, which ( 
gave rise later on to Kant's " Copernican revo- 
lution" in metaphysics. Hume's system, as 
expounded in the Treatise on Human Nature, 
was apparently unknown to his friend Diderot. 
Of course Diderot also believed that we never 
know anything but phenomena of consciousness, 
as he poetically expresses it in the Conclusion I 
of his Elements of Physiology (IX, 428) : " The | 
world is the house of fate. 4 Only at the end 
shall I know what I have lost or gained in this 
vast gambling-house in which I shall have spent i 
some sixty years, dice-box in hand, tesseras 
agitans. 

Felices quibus, ante annos, secura malorum 
Atque ignara sui, per ludum elabitur cetas. 

What do I see? Forms. And what else? J 
Forms. I do not know the thing. We walk 
among shadows, and we also are shadows for 

*Here I read "sort," instead of "fort," which is j 

evidently an erratum in the Assezat-Tourneux edition, | 

where the Elements were first printed. The erroneous 1 1 

reading, ' l Le monde est la maison du fort, ' ' led E. Caro | ! 

to suggest that Diderot might have thought here of the | 

struggle-for-life theory (E. Caro, La fin du dix-huitidme J 
siecle, 2d edition, 1881, p. 203). 



THE SCIENTIST 179 

other people and for ourselves." — Yet he was 
a phenomenist only as any scientist might be. 
He did not believe that things in themselves, 
substances, could be known : but he never ques- 
tioned the absolute value of the laws laid down 
by the understanding as governing the world of 
matter. He thought that man knows nothing 
but forms, facts, phenomena; but they are the 
object of science, the knowable part of the uni- 
verse. Concerning all that transcends them, 
there is no science, nothing but more or less 
plausible speculation. 

Later on, about the time when metaphysics 
had, as it were, a new birth in Kant's critique, 
we find Diderot tolling the knell of speculative 
philosophy : he was writing to Catherine II that 
the age was most propitious for the foundation 
of Universities, especially in Eussia, and he 
said : " The human mind seems to have cast off 
its shackles; the futility of Scholastic studies 
is acknowledged ; the rage for systematizing has 
ceased; there is no more any talk about Aris- 
totelianism, Cartesianism, Malebranchism, or 
Leibnitzianism ; the taste for true science reigns 
everywhere; knowledge of all kinds has been 



180 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

carried to a very high degree of perfection" 
(III, 441). In other words, a strong revival 
of the Positivistic spirit which had first shone 
with Bacon early in the seventeenth century, 
and which was to reappear in the nineteenth 
with Auguste Comte, had for a time driven 
metaphysics out of fashion, and obscured, in the 
most representative thinkers of the age, its high 
character and deep interest. If the proper 
object of philosophy is truly the investigation of 
the principles of human knowledge which are 
beyond the range of experimental science, no 
school of thinkers was more unphilosophic than 
that eighteenth century school of Shaftesbury, 
Voltaire, Diderot, which ridiculed " systematic " 
thought and identified philosophy with science. 
In the domain of science itself, the reaction 
against the constructive mechanism of the Car- 
tesians, who had freely used hypotheses in their 
demonstrations, brought about a strong preju- 
dice against all hypotheses. Newton's saying, 
Hypotheses non jingo, was constantly repeated, 
and taken in too strict a sense. Newtonians 
were apt to overlook the fact that gravitation 
itself was only a magnificent hypothesis. This 



THE SCIENTIST 181 

confusion arose from an inadequate perception 
of the differences between the metaphysical and 
the scientific kind of hypothesis, and was natural 
at a time when, the word " philosophy " having 
kept much of its ancient universal meaning, the 
boundaries between " first " philosophy and 
" natural " philosophy, metaphysics and science, 
were not yet very distinctly perceived. A 
metaphysical hypothesis appeared as a self- 
evident, self-sufficient principle, not susceptible 
of experimental confirmation, and claiming not 
to need proofs any more than the first principles 
of mathematics : the assumption of the existence 
of vacuum, or of ether, the "corpuscles" of 
matter, the " vortices " of the universe, belonged 
to that class of conjectural principles upon which 
the eighteenth-century thinkers looked with dif- 
fidence or contempt. A scientific hypothesis, on 
the other hand, as we admit of it to-day, is a 
merely provisional principle, subject to proof 
or rejection under the tests of experiment, and 
is as necessary to the progress of scientific in- 
vestigation as is the process of induction, of 
which it is a powerful auxiliary : for how could 
one resort to observation and experiment in a 



182 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

useful way, without a preconceived explanation 
of phenomena to conduct research, even if it 
eventually failed to be proved ? 

Thus scientific thought in the eighteenth cen- 
tury, through an excessive distrust of the 
indiscreet speculations in which the later Car- 
tesians had indulged, 5 tended to ignore the 
necessity of hypothesis and system in the inves- 
tigation of nature, while it emphasized the need 
of an abundant, indefatigable observation and 
collection of facts. All the credit which Des- 

6 Ch. Adam, in his work cited above (p. 374), to which 
we are here much indebted, points out that the reaction 
against Descartes, while extolling Bacon, did not alto- 
gether blind the more scientific minds of the age to the 
merits of the French philosopher. Fontenelle did not 
indiscriminately blame his boldness in speculation: "One 
must dare in every kind; but the difficulty is to dare 
with wisdom, and that is to reconcile a contradiction. ' ' 
He commended "a, lucky and wise boldness" in science. 
D'Alembert, in 1751, complained of too much timidity 
in Bacon, and compared Descartes with those revolu- 
tionists who at least prepare the future by destroying the 
past, even if the new regime which they set up does not 
realize their dreams. Lastly, at the end of the century, 
Oondorcet also thought Bacon too prudent, and admired 
Descartes as a conqueror in science, who forces truth 
before it surrenders: "the very boldness of his errors 
served the progress of the human mind better" than 
Bacon had done. 



THE SCIENTIST 183 

cartes was losing, as the most systematic of the 
fathers of modern science, was a gain for the 
more empiric Bacon and the less universal but 
more successful genius of Newton. 

Diderot, who had been freer than Voltaire in 
his criticism of the systems concerning the 
Deity, showed much more reserve than his great 
contemporary in his estimate of metaphysical 
systems. In spite of his positivistic professions 
and his fondness for facts and realities, he was 
himself by nature too much of a metaphysician 
not to appreciate to some extent the true great- 
ness of the synthetic constructions erected in 
the past to account for all that transcends the 
senses and experience, and the originality of 
other methods than the positive method of 
Bacon and Locke. While Voltaire had been 
indefatigable in denouncing the system of Des- 
cartes and refuting it by ridicule, Diderot only 
once had a fling at the " vorticoses," or partisans 
of the Cartesian theory of vortices, in a chapter 
of the Bijoux Indiscrets (IV, 162) ; and, 
although on that occasion he sided against them 
with the " attractionnaires " or Newtonians, he 
never professed the same worship as Voltaire 



184 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

for the discoverer of the law of gravitation : for 
was not gravitation in itself as obscure a prin- 
ciple as the vortices ? 6 On the other hand, com- 
paring Malebranche with Locke', his great master 
in philosophy, he did not hesitate to write: 
" Malebranche was one of the deepest and most 
sublime dreamers. One page of Locke contains 
more truths than all the volumes of Malebranche ; 
but one line of the latter perhaps shows more 
subtlety, imagination, penetration, and genius, 
than the whole of Locke's big book" (XVI, 53). 
In one of his most Baconian works, he sums 
up in a characteristic manner the tendencies and 
the results of the metaphysical and the physical 
schools of philosophy up to his own time : " To 
collect and to connect facts, are two very tedious 
occupations ; therefore philosophers have divided 
them between themselves. Some spend their 
lives in gathering materials, useful and active 

e Diderot, though, full of respect for Newton, had no 
patience with his less intelligent followers: "Men want 
to explain everything, well or ill, no matter; owing to 
this mania, the abhorrence for vacuum has caused water 
to rise in pumps, vortices have been the cause of the 
motions of celestial bodies, and for a long time yet 
attraction will be the cause of the weight of bodies . . . ' ' 
(Memoires . . . mathem., IX, 115). 



THE SCIENTIST 185 

artisans; others, proud architects, hasten to 
make use of the materials. But, up to the 
present, time has overthrown almost all the 
edifices of rational philosophy. Sooner or later, 
from the subterranean galleries where he digs 
blindly, the dusty workman brings up the piece 
that proves fatal to all that architecture raised 
by sheer intellect; down it comes, and nothing 
is left but the materials in pell-mell confusion, 
until some other rash genius undertakes to make 
a new combination of them. Happy is the 
systematic philosopher to whom nature has 
given, as she formerly gave to Epicurus, Lucre- 
tius, Aristotle, and Plato, a powerful imagina- 
tion, great eloquence, the art of expounding his 
ideas with striking, sublime images ! The edi- 
fice he has reared may fall one day; but his 
statue shall remain standing in the midst of 
ruins ; and the stone rolling down the mountain- 
side shall not shatter it, because the feet thereof 
are not of clay." 7 

7 Pensees sur V 'interpretation de la nature, XXI (CEuv., 
II, 19). — Comp. Montesquieu, Observations sur Vhistoire 
naturelle, 1721, read before the Academy of Sciences of 
Bordeaux: "A man does not need a great deal of wit to 
see a gnat in the microscope, or a star through great 



186 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Diderot as a scientist partook of both char- 
acters : he was to some extent a patient working- 
man in the field of nature; he also was a 
"dreamer/' or a speculative thinker, who did 
not fear to rise from the particularity of facts 
to the generality of no less vast a theory than 
Evolutionism. In science, he may be said to 
have had two masters : Bacon, for the collection 
of facts; and the ancient school of Atomism, 
which he knew mostly through Lucretius, 8 for 

telescopes, and that is the point in which physical science 
is so wonderful: great geniuses, narrow minds, mean 
intellects, all play their part in it; he who cannot frame 
a system, like Newton, will make an observation with 
which he may rack that great philosopher. ' f — ( s Yet, ' ' he 
adds, "Newton will always be Newton, that is, the suc- 
cessor of Descartes, and the other a common man, a low 
artisan, who has seen once and may never have thought. ' ' 
(Quoted by Ch. Adam, op. tit., p. 360.) 

8 The poem of Lucretius was translated into French 
by Lagrange, and published, after a revision by Naigeon, 
in 1768; both Diderot and Holbach had been interested 
in, and to some extent connected with, the undertaking. 
Abundant quotations from Lucretius are found in Dide- 
rot's writings about 1767 and 1768* (XI, 33, 76, 78, 164, 
331; XIII, 18, 94, n.; etc.), and D'Alembert's Dream 
was written in 1769. For some years past Diderot had 
been concerned with the question of the influence of 
functions on the modification of organs: see his Salon of 
1765, in which the connection between his scientific and 
his esthetic ideas is curiously illustrated. 



THE SCIENTIST 187 

the connection of phenomena and their higher 
interpretation. Since his philosophic generali- 
zations are essentially of a concrete nature, based 
on scientific observations which were new in his 
age, and since they are closely connected with 
his studies in chemistry and natural history, 
we shall feel justified in giving them a fuller 
consideration in this chapter than in our pre- 
ceding estimate of the Philosopher. 

He had early been much interested in mathe- 
matics, probably before he was more absorbed 
by physiology, physics, chemistry, and their 
applications to the needs of man. He was not 
content with giving private lessons, in which he 
" learned while teaching others, and made some 
proficient pupils"; he attempted to do some 
original work. Hence his commentary on New- 
ton's Principles of Mathematics, which he sup- 
pressed when Fathers Jacquier and Le Sueur 
published theirs (IX, 168), and his Hve Mem- 
oirs on sundry subjects of mathematics, which 
appeared in 1748 to redeem the impression 
created by his frivolous novel, the Bijoux 
Indiscrets. We know from Diderot himself 



188 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

(IX, 252) that of all his works he valued most 
a certain mathematical dissertation andD'Alem- 
hert's Dream. 

The volume of Memoirs of Mathematics was 
elegantly illustrated with emblematic cuts by a 
certain "!N". Blakey, Londineus," 9 and was 
typical of those scientific works which eight- 
eenth-century writers designed for the ladies' 
drawing-room tables as well as for the scholars' 
or scientists' shelves. Its contents are far from 
being of a trifling nature ; they are indeed more 
fit to be judged by the distinguished mathe- 
matician, Madame de Premontval, to whom they 
were dedicated, than by modern students of lit- 
erary history. Let us at least point out that 
these papers evince a great degree of familiarity 
with the state of some scientific problems at that 
time, abroad as well as in France. 

The First Memoir deals with the "general 
principles of the science of sound, with a sin- 
gular method of fixing the sound, so that one 

9 Nicholas Blakey, a designer and engraver, born in 
Ireland, spent the greater part of his life in Paris; he 
is said to have acquired much repute as an illustrator of 
books; the dates of his birth and his death are not known 
(Diet. Nat. Biogr.). 



THE SCIENTIST 189 

may at any time and in any place play a piece 
of music in exactly the same tone." In this 
work Diderot alludes to the determination of 
the speed of sound by Halley and Flamsteed, 
and the experiments made by Derham concern- 
ing the influence of a favorable or contrary wind 
on its transmission. He further discusses and 
corrects the solution given by Taylor, a con- 
temporary of Newton, to the problem of the 
relation between the number of vibrations of a 
chord in a given time and its length, weight, 
and tension. Passing over the Second Memoir, 
on the circle-wrapper (la developpante du cercle), 
and the Third, on the tension of chords, we 
notice that the Fourth Paper relates to an im- 
provement of the German organ, or street organ, 
a popular instrument which seems to have been 
improved shortly after by a Parisian con- 
structor, on the lines suggested by Diderot. In 
England, the Gentleman s Magazine for 1749 
(pp. 339, 405, 495) greatly commended Di- 
derot's Second and Fourth Dissertations, and 
called the attention of specialists to his plan for 
a new organ. The Fifth Memoir, on the resist- 
ance of the air to the motion of pendulums, 



190 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

demonstrates that this retardation is like the 
squares of the arcs described, against Newton's 
contention that it was like the arcs. Diderot 
concludes by inviting experiment in this matter : 
" I have," he says, " for Newton all the defer- 
ence that we owe to men unique in their kind ; 
I am much inclined to believe that the truth is 
on his side ; yet it is right to make this sure." 

A difficulty raised against the explanation of 
cohesion in bodies by the principle of attraction 
suggested another paper by Diderot which was 
inserted in the Memoires de Trevoux, for April, 
1761. Here he attempted to defend the exten- 
sion of the Newtonian principle from the mo- 
tions of celestial bodies and of falling bodies to 
several other natural facts related to cohesion. 

In the same year, 1761, he had occasion to 
write two papers, in answer to D'Alembert, 
whose Opuscules Mathematiques had just ap- 
peared. One of Diderot's papers discussed the 
calculation of probabilities; the other was de- 
voted to a very interesting application of that 
kind of calculation to a question which, in some 
quarters, is still open to-day : it was concerning 
the advisability of inoculation, or vaccination. 



THE SCIENTIST 191 

D'Alembert had given statistics that were not 
favorable to vaccination. Diderot criticized his 
friend's figures, and vigorously defended a 
practice which, however dangerous it proved 
in some individual cases (easily exaggerated at 
a time when vaccination was an English nov- 
elty), he considered indispensable to prevent 
or to check the ravages of small-pox in a com- 
munity. According to him, it was only through 
a selfish, narrow application of the calculation 
of probabilities that the individual chances of 
death from small-pox were balanced against 
those of death by inoculation : a higher reason 
for the general practice of vaccination lay in the 
dangers of contagion and large mortality which 
had been made but too manifest in the past. 

The interest which Diderot had shown for 
questions of acoustics again appeared later in 
his life, when he practically composed, under 
the name of the German Bemetzrieder, who 
taught Mile Diderot music, a method for teach- 
ing the clavecin, or harpsichord, and the ele- 
ments of harmony. The notes on music, which 
he had collected since the early days when he 
associated with composers like Rameau, J.-J. 



192 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Rousseau, Gretry, and enlightened amateurs 
like Grimm, he handed to Charles Burney 10 for 
his work on the state of music in France and 
Italy. 

It was about the year 1750, when he had set 
about the enormous task of the Encyclopedic, 
that the scientific activity of Diderot displayed 
itself in the widest and the most varied fields. 
The influence of Bacon was at that time very 
powerful over the minds of the two editors of 
the Encyclopedic, when they planned to give a 
full account of the contemporary state of all the 
branches of human knowledge. This period 
seems to have marked a decline in Diderot's 
interest in pure mathematics (which D'Alembert 
thought a matter for regret) and a correspond- 
ing increase in his chemical and biological stud- 
ies. He attended the courses which Rouelle 
gave in chemistry, where he had Rousseau, and 
probably Lavoisier, as fellow-students; Locke's 
maxim, Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius 
fuerit in sensu, was conspicuously displayed on 
the walls of Rouelle's laboratory. 11 Those lec- 

10 Corresp. litter., Tourneux ed., I, p. 313, n. 

11 Ch. Adam, op. cit., p. 357.— On Eouelle (l'Aine), 
who is to be counted among the founders of chemistry, 



THE SCIENTIST 193 

tures on chemistry have been preserved from the 
notes taken by Diderot in 1754r-1755, put in 
order and written out by him in 1756, and re- 
vised in 1757 and 1758. 12 He also attended 
courses in physiology and medicine, trying to 
be present at important operations, and vari- 
ously improving his knowledge by reading med- 
ical works and conversing with doctors, of whose 
society he was especially fond. He was well 
known as the learned translator of that huge 
encyclopedia of medical lore, James's Medicinal 
Dictionary. He must have early begun that 
large collection of facts, confirming his theories 
on the origin of life and the variation of species, 
which has been preserved, in a somewhat undi- 
gested shape, under the title of Elements of 
Physiology. 

From that variety of studies, and his familiar- 
ity with Bacon's works, resulted the composition 
of his Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature 
(1754), a work which is Baconian not only in 
its title, borrowed from several of Bacon's works 

see the Notice of Diderot (VI, 405-410); also Ferd. 
Hoefer, Histoire de la chimie, II, 386. 
12 Revue Scientifique, July 26, 1884. 
14 



194 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

which bear it, 13 but in its general inspiration. 
It is, in fact, a series of aphorisms, more or less 
developed, mingled with scientific "conjectures," 
some of which have been justified by later ex- 
periments. 

The influence of Bacon on Diderot seems as 
direct, although not as often traceable through 
literal transcriptions, as that of Shaftesbury. 
The Pensees philosophiques were to a large ex- 
tent quotations from Shaftesbury; the Pensees 
sur V interpretation de la nature are rather the 
notes and jottings of a scientist reading the 
works of Bacon. Diderot's Prospectus of the 
Encyclopedie, which we shall consider in the 
next chapter, affords clear evidence of an avowed 
discipleship ; the Pensees sur V interpretation de 
la nature are Baconian in a more independent 
manner. They embody the spirit of Bacon's 
experimental method, proclaim anew the mes- 
sage of the Great Instauration, in a somewhat 
modernized and disconnected fashion, and are 

13 The Cogitata et Visa de witerpretatione naturae, sive 
de scientia operativa, not included in Blackbourne 's edi- 
tion of Bacon's Opera Omnia in 1730; the very similar 
first book of the Novum Organum, entitled Aphorismi de 
Interpretation Natures et Begno Hominis. 



THE SCIENTIST 195 

illustrated by '" anticipations " or hypotheses in 
certain fields of science which in Bacon's age 
were almost or altogether unexplored. 

Diderot begins by advocating a closer alliance 
between ingenious and patient men, men with 
ideas and men with instruments, to " unite and 
direct all their efforts at once against the resist- 
ance of nature." 14 He then proclaims the neces- 
sary decline of pure mathematics in the near 
future, because they are useful only in conjunc- 
tion with experiment, and are nothing, taken in 
themselves, but " a kind of general metaphysics, 
in which bodies are divested of their individual 
qualities." 15 As for the phenomena of nature, 

14 (We quote from the edition of the Works of Francis 
Bacon by J. Spedding, E. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 
Boston, 1861, 15 vols.) — Bacon, Nov. Org., Pref., wishes 
to have two "tribes" or "families of contemplators or 
philosophers," not hostile, "but rather allied and united 
by mutual assistance," the one practising a method 
called "the anticipation of the mind," the other "the 
interpretation of nature." He often dwells on the use- 
fulness of efforts proceeding from the most various 
minds (Sped., I, 237). 

15 Bacon, Be Augmentis, (Sped., II, 305): "Nescio 
. . . quo fato fiat ut Mathematica et Logiea, quae ancil- 
larum loco erga Physicam se gerere debent, nihilominus 
certitudinem suam prae ea jactantes, dominatum contra 
exercere prsesumant. ' ' He elsewhere claims that optics 



196 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

which are more properly the objects of true 
science, their infinite multitude and astounding 
variety and the confusion introduced by the 
terms used to designate them might well dis- 
courage men; but "usefulness circumscribes 
everything," and will set limits to the sciences 
of nature, the most useful of all, as it has done 
to mathematics. 16 Notions which have no 
foundation in experience, that is, in the outside 
world, are nothing but " opinions " ; they are 
comparable to those Northern forests in which 
the trees have no roots and are felled by a blast 
of wind. The investigation of truth must be 
made through the senses and reflection: man 

and astronomy belong to physics more properly than to 
mathematics, by which they have been invaded. 

In the Advancement of Learning, Bk II (Sped., VI, 
225): " There remaineth yet another part of Natural 
Philosophy, which is commonly made a principal part, 
and holdeth rank with Physic special and Metaphysic; 
which is Mathematic; but I think it more agreeable to 
the nature of things, and to the light of order, to place 
it as a branch of Metaphysic. , . .'" 

"For the utilitarian standpoint in science, see Bacon, 
Be Augmentis, Bk V, c. 2 ; Nov. Org., I, Aphor. 73 ; and 
Cogitata et Visa. — The apparent hopelessness of the 
task confronting natural philosophers is also a familiar 
topic throughout Bacon's works: Nov. Org., I, Aphor. 
118, etc. 



THE SCIENTIST 197 

must incessantly go in and out of himself, as 
the bee does to collect honey in its hive. 17 Un- 
fortunately, it is much easier to consult one's 
own mind than nature ; hence so many systems. 
The systematic philosopher often perceives 
truth, as the unskilled politician sees oppor- 
tunity, from the bald side, and asserts that it 
cannot be grasped, while the experimental 
worker seizes it through chance by the fore- 
lock. 18 Great men have not been lacking, yet 
the amount of true knowledge is very scanty, 
because they have given too much attention to 
the abstract sciences, 19 and words have been 
multiplied instead of things. " The true way 
of philosophizing should have been and should 

17 Similarly Bacon, Nov. Org., I, Aphor. 95, compares 
the empirics to ants, the dogmatical to spiders, while the 
true labor of philosophy resembles that of the bee, which 
1 l extracts matter from the flowers of the garden and the 
field, but works and fashions it by its own efforts.' ' 

18 Bacon, Phenomena Universi, Pref. (Sped., VII, 
232) : ". . . Naturam, ut fortunam, a f route capillatam, 
ab occipito calvam esse. ' ' Also Nov. Org., I, Aphor. 121. 

19 Nov. Org., I, Aphor. 79-80. — '.'. . . Nemo expectet 
magnum progressum in scientiis (praesertim in parte 
earum operativa), nisi Philosophia Naturalis ad scientias 
particulares producta fuerit, et scientiae particulars 
rursus ad Naturalem Philosophiam reductae" (Sped., I, 
286). 



198 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

be to apply the understanding to the under- 
standing; the understanding and experiment, to 
the senses ; the senses, to nature ; nature, to the 
investigation of instruments; instruments, to 
the research and improvement of arts, which 
would be thrown to the common people to teach 
them to respect philosophy." The standard of 
usefulness is the only one which the vulgar 
knows. It is unfortunate that rational or sys- 
tematic philosophy should have spent so much 
ingenuity in connecting facts, instead of col- 
lecting them ; for facts, of whatever nature, are 
the philosopher's true wealth. Useful discoveries 
are often reached in experimental physics, as it 
were by chance, 20 while the investigator is look- 
ing for other results ; as the ploughman's sons in 
the fable reaped an unexpected harvest, or dis- 
covered a mine of lead, while they had been dig- 
ing for hidden gold. 21 The experimental philo- 
sopher, through long practice, acquires an in- 

20 Bacon, Of the Advanc. of Learning, Bk II (Sped., 
VI, 261-262). 

21 This, illustration is applied by Bacon to the researches 
of the Chemists, who, while looking for gold, had inci- 
dentally made some very useful discoveries (Cogitata et 
Visa, Sped., VII, 121; Be Augmentis, lib. I, Sped., II, 
134). 



THE SCIENTIST 199 

stinct or scent for discovering truth, comparable 
to Socrates' "familiar demon" ; it were useful to 
reduce that instinct into clear notions, so as to 
impart it to other men. Nothing can be more op- 
posed to the true spirit of scientific research than 
an affectation of power or mystery, that " affecta- 
tion of great masters" illustrated by Newton 
and Stahl, which often robs them of the credit 
of their discoveries, and tends to make philo- 
sophy unpopular. Read Franklin's Observations 
and Experiments on Electricity, to learn how 
experiments may be varied ; make tables of the 
qualities of matter, and apply them to the sub- 
ject of your investigation; practice the "inver- 
sion" of experiment, 22 and be not fondly at- 
tached to any system from which you may have 
started. Vary the objects of your experiments ; 
complicate, combine them in every possible 
manner. Some phenomena may be quite near 
us, by which in the future physics will reduce 
gravity, elasticity, attraction, magnetism, elec- 
tricity, all to one principle. Enlightening facts 
are often found in those which appear deceptive, 

22 On the formation of " tables,' \ see Nov. Org., II, 
Aphor. 10 sqq. — The ' ' inversion, ' ' in De Augmentis Sc, 
Lib. V, cap. 2 (Sped., II, 380). 



200 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

or in contradiction with our system. Experi- 
ment must be free ; it must not be distorted, and 
made to lie, by showing only examples that 
prove, and excluding others that disprove, our 
idea. 23 We must not shape things according to 
our notions, but reform our notions according to 
things. Methods are not to be trusted utterly; 
for by following the wrong road persistently, a 
man loses his way more and more. 24 Instru- 
ments and measures, used as auxiliaries to the 
senses, may be as misleading as they; experi- 
ment will serve to test them, and then will safely 
borrow their help. Obstacles are to be met not 
only in nature, but in men; for every age 

23 Aristotle is charged with this abuse of experiment in 
Nov. Org., I, Aphor. 63: ". . . Experientiam ad sua 
plaeita tortam circumdueit et captivam ; ' ' — and in the 
Bedargutio Philosophiarum (Sped., VII, 91): "Illi 
(Aristoteli) enim mos erat non liberam experientiam 
consulere, sed captivam ostentare; nee earn ad veritatis 
inquisitionem promiscuam et aequam, sed ad dietorum 
suorum fidem soUieitatam et electam adducere." 

24 In Bacon, Advanc. of Learning, Bk I (Sped., VI, 
131), there is only a caution against the error of an 
"over-early and peremptory reduction of knowledge into 
arts and methods. ' ' It seems as though here Diderot had 
had in view the Cartesian principle of abiding by the 
method once chosen, even if it is bad, in order eventually 
to come out of error. 



THE SCIENTIST 201 

abounds in sjstematics and divines 25 who, in 
their constant opposition to the natural philos- 
opher, are comparable to those ephemeral insects 
who must needs disturb man in his work and his 
rest. The chain of causes and effects is infinite, 
and we must stop in our conjectures where we 
are on the point of transcending nature. Final 
causes are bad for the interpretation of nature, 26 
even in natural theology : for they amount to a 
substitution of man's conjecture to the work of 
God. The physicist should not concern himself 
with the " Why," but only try and explain the 
" How " ; 27 the latter being derived from things, 
the former from our understanding only. Com- 
mon prejudices and axioms are snares to our 
precipitation: the "Nihil sub sole novum," for 
instance, is little else than an absurdity; the 
philosopher must severely criticize the so-called 
popular wisdom. 28 

25 Bacon, Nov. Org., I, Aphor. 89, and Cogitata et Visa 
(Sped., VII, 108) ; also Filum Labyrinthi sive Formula 
Inquisitionis (Sped., VI, 421). 

26 Be Augmentis Sc, Lib. Ill, cap. 4 (Sped., II, 294), 
and Nov. Org., II, Aphor. 2: " Causa Finalis tantum 
abest ut pTosit, ut etiam scientias corrumpat. . . ." 

27 Nov. Org., I, Aphor. 66. 

28 This is probably a suggested addition to Bacon's 



202 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

The foregoing analysis may suffice to show 
how thoroughly imbued Diderot was with the 
philosophy of Bacon, when he wrote the Pensees 
sur r interpretation de la nature. The opening 
apostrophe of the book : " Young man, take this, 
and read . . . ," which puzzled and amused 
Diderot's contemporaries, is but a reminiscence 
of Bacon's favorite form of address "Ad 
Filios " ; and we are inclined to think that the 
Prayer which was inserted at the end of some 
copies of the Pensees, is likewise in imitation 
of the author of the Great Instauration. The 
scientific illustrations given in conjunction with 
Diderot's aphorisms are mainly derived from 
studies in electricity, then much in vogue. We 
have seen how Diderot held up to his country- 
men Franklin's book on electricity, just trans- 
lated by the Abbe d'Alibard (1752), as a model 
of scientific investigation. It is very much to 
be regretted that Diderot did not develop his 
ideas concerning electricity at least as much as 
he had done his notions concerning some sub- 
jects in geometry and acoustics. Had he de- 
well known criticism of the " Idols/ ' or common human 
errors (Nov. Org., I, Aphor. 39 sqq.) ; it comes directly 
from Be Augm., lib. I (Sped., II, 166). 



THE SCIENTIST 203 

voted several papers, instead of only a few il- 
luminating paragraphs of his Interpretation de 
la nature, to the then new problems of electric- 
ity, had he above all had the means and leisure 
of contriving experiments in that field, he might 
have conclusively shown, before CErsted and 
Ampere, that electricity and magnetism were 
identical in nature, and that many unexplained 
phenomena, enumerated in his Second, Third, 
and Fourth Conjectures, could be reduced to the 
newly discovered principle. He thought that 
the constitution and the motion of the earth 
might account for the direction of the magnetic 
needle, the Northern lights, and many other 
natural facts : " These notions," he added, " may 
be received or controverted, because they have 
as yet no reality except in my understanding. 
Experiments must substantiate them ; the physi- 
cist must imagine experiments that will sepa- 
rate the phenomena and completely identify 
them" (II, .28). It is unfortunate perhaps 
that, like his master Bacon, he suggested more 
for others to do than he attempted himself to 
achieve. Yet raising doubts and making scien- 
tific hypotheses was more commendable than 



204 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

dogmatizing : " I throw my ideas on paper, and 
they become what they may" (I, 406). 

Diderot could apparently not be a specialist 
in science any more than in philosophy, because 
his mind was, from the first, essentially ency- 
clopedic. Being interested in everything, he 
could not devote his life to any one particular 
pursuit, be it ethics, or chemistry, or physiology, 
or the arts and crafts, or mathematics, or litera- 
ture. In his age, and with his singular capacity 
for every kind of work, the one work for which 
he was fitted, and which he successfully carried 
out, was the production of an Encyclopedia, the 
first of the bulky encyclopedias of modern times, 
for the propagation of practical knowledge and 
the promotion of useful ideas. 

Hence his strong disapproval of anything 
that tended to obscure human knowledge, or 
keep it under the bushel, for whatever purpose. 
It has been seen that he blamed Newton and 
Stahl for what he called the "affectation of 
great masters " : the former having held back 
his discovery of differential calculus until 
Leibnitz in his turn had discovered it and 
claimed the credit of it for himself; the latter 



I 



THE SCIENTIST 205 

having invested valuable chemical theories with 
the obscurity of language and affected mystery 
of alchemy. Are not the veils of nature thick 
enough for our eyes, that the most enlightened 
men should further wrap in darkness the truth 
which they chance to discover? When the in- 
vention, besides, is immediately beneficial to 
mankind, like that alleged cure for a disease 
reputed incurable, by a certain Dr Keyser, 
which was then much discussed, or the dis- 
covery of a secret of ancient painters for paint- 
ing with wax, our encyclopedist shunned all 
considerations regarding a legitimate profit for 
the inventors, fought to get possession of the 
secret, and hastened to publish it. Keyser's 
secret he does not seem to have found; but on 
the question of wax-painting he cheerfully 
entered the lists against the antiquarian Comte 
de Caylus, and published the results attained 
in the same field by a young painter, his friend, 
named Bachelier. Of any scientific discovery 
he might have said, as he said of esthetic pleas- 
ures : " Any pleasure that is for me alone moves 
me but little, and is of short duration. ... It 
is for my friends as well as for myself that I 



206 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

read, reflect, write, meditate, hear, see, and) 
feel " (XI, 115). All truth, as he thought with I 
Bacon, was to be imparted to mankind ; the in- 
ventor must think of the community rather than j 
of himself, his interests, and his glory: hiding j 
useful discoveries is little short of criminal. | 
" We invite all artisans," he said in the Encyclo- . 
pedie, " to take advice from the scientists, and 
not to allow the discoveries that they will make 
to die with them. Let them be aware that to ! 
hide a useful secret is to be guilty of theft 
towards society ; and that, in such cases, it is as 
base to put the interest of one man above the 
interest of all, as in a hundred other cases con- j 
cerning which they themselves would not hesi- ' 
tate to decide" (XIII, 371). 



Diderot's scientific activity, as we have re- 
marked before, was not confined to facts, obser- 
vations, experiments, that is, to borrow Bacon's 
term, to " works." He was truly great in daring 
to soar above the contemporary state of science, 
and boldly framing a hypothetical theory of the 
universe. In this he certainly went beyond the 
precepts of Bacon and the practice of English 



THE SCIENTIST 207 

Baconians. Yet his hypothesis, which to him- 
self appeared as a rather wild venture, was truly 
of a scientific, not metaphysical, order; for the 
next century brought little that could invalidate, 
and much that confirmed it. He only ceased to 
be a Baconian, so to speak, where he began to 
be a Darwinian avant la lettre. 

Had Saunderson really seen on his deathbed 
his wonderful vision of the first stages of the 
world, as recorded by the mythical Inchliff, he 
would to-day be quoted among the forerunners 
of Evolutionism. As it is, the works that at- 
tracted Diderot's attention to the question of the 
origin of animate and inanimate nature were 
those of his French contemporaries, De Maillet, 
Bonnet, Bobinet, Buffon to some extent, but 
above all Maupertuis. 29 As early as 1749, Di- 
derot had conceived the idea that the universe 
might not have been for all time past in its 
present order, but that it must have undergone 
an infinite series of transformations before 
reaching its present state; and that, as far as 
life is concerned, nature had probably produced 

29 Marcel Landrieu, Lamarck et ses precurseurs, in 
Bevue anthropologique, 1906 (vol. XVI), pp. 152-169. 



208 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

an immense number of forms, monsters or 
"sports," not fitted to endure, as well as those 
other kinds which had survived because they ; 
had proved able to " subsist by their own means 
and perpetuate themselves." In 1754, he faced i 
the same problem again, while discussing a 
dissertation by Maupertuis; and he was then I 
led, in one of the most illuminating pages of the ' 
Pensees sur V interpretation de la nature, clearly 
to express the great philosophic doubt which in 
his days it was prudent to express with some j 
reserves, in the form of a "question" or a J 
" conjecture " : 

" Just as in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, I 
an individual begins, increases, endures, decays, U 
and passes away, might it not be the same for 
species as a whole ? Were we not taught by our 
faith that the animals came out of the Creator's 
hands such as we see them, and were it allowed i 
to entertain the least uncertainty about their ii 
beginning and their end, might not the philoso- 
pher, left to his conjectures, suspect that animal- 
ity had its particular elements, from all eternity, ■ 
scattered and mixed in the mass of matter ; that |t| 
those elements happened to meet, because it was 
possible that it should happen ; that the embryo , 
formed from those elements passed through an 
infinite number of organizations and develop- 



THE SCIENTIST 209 

ments; that by succession it acquired motion, 
sensations, ideas, thought, reflection, conscious- 
ness, sentiments, passions, signs, gestures, 
sounds, articulate sounds, a language, laws, 
sciences and arts ; that millions of years elapsed 
between each of these developments; that it 
may perhaps still have other developments to 
undergo, other increases to receive, which are 
unknown to us; that it has had or will have a 
stationary state; that it is receding or will re- 
cede from that state through an everlasting 
decay, during which its faculties will go out of 
it as they had come ; that it will disappear from 
nature for ever, or rather that it will continue 
to exist in nature, but in a form and with facul- 
ties very different from those that are perceived 
in it at this instant of duration ? Keligion saves 
us many wanderings and a great deal of work ! " 
(II, 57-58). 

Between 1754 and 1759, that is, roughly, 
while his labors as editor of the Encyclopedic 
took up most of his time, Diderot did not give 
any further developments to his favorite theory 
of the evolution of life ; but he meditated about 
it a great deal: he gradually discarded the 
notion of a common prototype or "embryo" of 
all living forms, constituted by eternal particles 
of animate matter, and paid more attention to 
15 



210 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

the criticism of the accepted definitions of 
matter and life, inanimate and animate nature. 
To his profound view, that the order of the 
universe was not absolute, but relative, not im- 
mutably fixed, but forever changing, he then 
added this important hypothesis, that every- 
thing in nature is in a perpetual process of 
transformation, through forces inherent in mat- 
ter. The artificial character of all the fixed 
distinctions commonly established by scientists 
and philosophers between inertia, motion, life, 
consciousness, he tried to demonstrate in his 
Philosophic Principles on Matter and Motion 
(1770), and in that medley of madness and deep 
thinking, as he called it, entitled D'Alembert's 
Dream (written in 1769, published in 1830). 
In this fully developed form, his transformistic 
theories constitute a rather crude, but exceed- 
ingly original system, far mOre interesting and 
fruitful than the cut and dried materialism of 
his friends Helvetius and Holbach. The scien- 
tific miscellanies collected under the title of 
Elements of Physiology, and first published in 
the Assezat-Tourneux edition, may in part rep- 
resent the Baconian " tables" of facts on which 
the system rests. 



THE SCIENTIST 2H 

Can matter be conceived as eternally and 
essentially invested with motion? Can matter 
and motion spontaneously generate life? Can 
the living molecules of primitive chaos have 
given rise to all the forms of life, vegetal and 
animal, from the lowest to the most highly or- 
ganized ? — All these questions Diderot answered 
in the affirmative in 1769 and 1770. 

His Philosophic Principles on Matter and 
Motion, one of his most original contributions 
to the philosophy of science, may be considered 
as the outcome of his long study of natural 
philosophy under Eouelle and other masters, 
and of his discussions with D'Alembert and 
Holbach. Matter, he thought, never is at rest. 
The state of rest is nothing but an abstraction. 
All bodies gravitate, and all the particles of 
bodies gravitate ; bodies therefore are full of 
latent energies. " The molecule, endowed with 
a quality proper to its nature, is by itself an 
active force" (II, 65). The assertion that 
matter is essentially inert is "a tremendous 
mistake, contrary to all sound physics and 
chemistry." No outside force is needed to set 
matter in motion; for matter, being hetero- 



212 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

geneous in its nature, has in itself the principle 
of motion, it is eternally in nisu. The capital 
error of philosophers has been to imagine matter 
as homogeneous, inert, indifferent to motion and 
rest. The universe conceived by science shall 
be a closed system of forces. " The supposition 
of any being whatever, placed outside of the 
material universe, is impossible. One should 
never make such suppositions, because nothing 
can be inferred from them" (II, 69). 

As for the passage from matter to life: Di- 
derot solved it by denying that there was any 
irreducible difference, any impassable gulf be- 
tween them. In his age, and for a long time 
after, it appeared legitimate to think that what 
is called organic matter, and even rudimentary 
living forms, might be created, under proper 
conditions, through spontaneous generation. 
The experiments of Needham on that subject 
had attracted a great deal of attention: in ex- 
amining the fermentation of yeast in the micro- 
scope, he had discovered numberless moving 
bodies which he had taken to be micro-organisms 
spontaneously generated from the flour. Vol- 
taire had made great fun of Eeedham and his 



THE SCIENTIST 213 

microscopic "eels"; but Diderot did not think 
them so ridiculous after all (II, 131). Need- 
ham later on had felt uneasy when he had been 
charged with undermining the belief in the 
Biblical account of creation, and, says Diderot, 
had turned theologian "in self-defence " (IX, 
437). Torn between science and the Bible, 
rationalism and faith, he had, like many men 
before and after him, done his best to keep one 
foot ashore while he put the other in the boat. 30 
The French philosopher had no inclination to 
spare beliefs which he no longer shared, and, 
besides, he was not writing for the press : hence 
arose his altogether un-English boldness in his 
speculations on animate and inanimate matter. 
From Needham's experiments, and others of a 
similar nature by Beccari, Kessel and Mayer, 
Rouelle, Macquer, on vegetable fibrine, from ob- 
servations on the Muscipula Dionsea, on anther- 
ozoids, zoophytes, and various modes of animal 
and vegetable life, he concluded that the bound- 
aries between the mineral, vegetable, and animal 
"reigns" of nature were not at all fixed and 

80 Max Miiller, quoted in E. Caro, Problemes de morale 
sociale, p. 272. 



214 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

immutable. 31 Many very familiar facts, as the 
phenomenon of the assimilation of food, that is, 
the tranformation of inanimate into animate 
matter, sufficiently prove, according to him, that 
a divergence between the properties of two forms • 
of matter has been exaggerated into a funda- 
mental difference. Life cannot be conceived 
as a kind of mysterious entity which, in certain 
given conditions, invests matter. Diderot in 
1759 strove to prove to Hoop and the Holbach 
family that, if the particles of matter are con- 
ceived as dead and inert, no change of their 
position in relation to animate, sentient particles 
can possibly make them live, " Sentiment and 
life therefore are eternal, What lives has always 
lived, and shall live without end. The only 
difference I know between death and life is, 
that you now live in a mass, and that dissolved, 
scattered in molecules, you will live in detail 
twenty years hence" (XVIII, 407). 

31 For a criticism of the endeavors to prove spontaneous 
generation, from Needham to Pouchet, and a statement 
of the problem of life in its modern form, see Prof. E. 
A. Sehafer, The Nature, Origin and Maintenance of Life 
(Inaugural Address of the President of the British 
Association for the Advancement of Science), 1912. 



THE SCIENTIST 215 

On another occasion, in 1769/ after he had 
defended this same "paradox" of the eternity 
and the ubiquity of life and sentiment against 
his friend D'Alembert, he wrote down the Con- 
versation between D'Alembert and Diderot, and 
imagined a Dream of his friend as a sequel or 
result of the conversation. D'Alembert talks in 
his sleep, imagining that he is still engaged in 
his discussion with " le philosophe " ; Mile de 
Lespinasse and Dr Bordeu watch over him, the 
former much puzzled by his incoherent talk, 
while the latter is extremely interested : 

"All beings circulate in one another, conse- 
quently all species. ... Everything is in per- 
petual flow. . . . Every animal is more or less 
man ; every mineral is more or less plant ; every 
plant is more or less animal. There is nothing 
definite in nature. . . . And you talk of indi- 
viduals, poor philosophers! Leave your indi- 
viduals; answer me. Is there one atom in 
nature absolutely like another atom? . . . 'No. 
. . . Do you not acknowledge that everything 
holds together in nature, and that it is impos- 
sible that there should be a gap in the chain? 
What do you mean then with your individuals ? 
There are none, no, there are none. . . . There 
is nothing but one great individual, that is the 
whole. In that whole, as in a machine, as in 



216 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

any animal, there is a part which you will call 
such or such; but when you give the name of 
individual to that part of the whole, it is through 
as false a concept as if, in a bird, you called the 
wing, or a quill on that wing, an individual. 
. . . And you talk of essences, poor philosophers ! 
Leave your essences. Consider the general mass, 
and if your imagination is too narrow to com- 
pass it, consider your first origin and ultimate 
end. . . . G Architas! you who measured the 
globe, what are you? A handful of dust. . . . 
What is a being ? . . . The sum of a certain num- 
ber of tendencies. . . . Can I be anything else 
but a tendency ? . . . !No, I am going towards a 
goal. . . . And the species? . . . Species are 
nothing but tendencies to a certain common goal 
of their own. . . . And life ? Life is a succession 
of actions and reactions. . . . Living, I act and 
react en masse. . . . Dead, I act and react in 
molecules. . . . Then I do not die ? . . . No, cer- 
tainly, I do not die in that sense, either I, or 
anything that is. ... To be born, to live, and to 
pass away, are changes of form. . . . And what 
matters one form or another? Each form has 
the happiness and unhappiness that are its own. 
From the elephant to the gnat, . . . from the 
gnat to the sentient living molecule, the origin 
of all, there is not a point in the whole of nature 
that does not suffer or enjoy" (II, 138-140). 

Before this monistic system, in which the 
living cell was the origin and the composing 



THE SCIENTIST 217 

element of all living forms, and life was admitted 

as existing, at least potentially, in all matter, 

the Cartesian theory of animal mechanism 

crumbled to pieces (II, 115) ; the identity of 

man's self was found to be based on memory 

alone, since his physical and psychological 

frame was in a state of constant transformation ; 

determinism reigned, and with moral liberty 

the notion of responsibility disappeared, so that 

a reform of the foundations of ethics became 

necessary. 32 In other words, man ceased to be 

an exception in the universe; he was wholly 

reintegrated into the realm and under the laws 

of nature. He was shown to be merely a lucky 

82 The Lettre d' envoi (IX, 252), subjoined to a lost 
version of the Dream, makes a few distinctions which 
unphilosophic minds are too prone to forget: Diderot 
beseeches his correspondent "not to judge him without 
meditation, not to make any extract from this shapeless 
and dangerous production, the publication of which would 
irretrievably destroy the author's rest, fortune, life, 
honor, or the just opinion that is entertained of his 
morals": "Remember the difference between illicit and 
criminal ethics; do not forget that the honest man does 
nothing criminal, and the good citizen nothing illicit; 
that there is a speculative doctrine which is not for the 
multitude, nor for practice; and that if, without being 
false, we do not write all that we do, so without being 
inconsistent we do not do all we write." 



218 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

survivor, or rather a cunning, successful con- 
queror, in the great struggle that had begun 
since living forms had originated out of chaos. 

After listening for some time to the appar- 
ently incoherent Dream, Dr Bordeu remarks: 
" He has made a rather fine excursion. This is 
very high philosophy: systematic for the pres- 
ent, but I believe that the more man advances 
in knowledge, the more this will be confirmed " 
(II, 140). It is indeed astonishing to find with 
what well-grounded confidence Diderot awaited 
the verdict of later ages : " I feel rightly, and I 
judge rightly," he wrote to Grimm, "and time 
in the end always follows my taste and my 
opinion. Do not laugh: it is I who anticipate 
the future and know its thought " (Dec. 3, 1765 ; 
XVIII, 475). 

He knew that, before his anticipations could 
be verified, and cease to be mere "opinions," 
much work had to be accomplished in botany, 
comparative anatomy, and geology. In the 
opening pages of his Elements of Physiology, 
he vaguely outlined some of the directions of 
future researches : 



THE SCIENTIST 219 

" Beings.— One must begin by classifying 
beings, from the inert molecule, if there is any, 
to the living molecule, the microscopic animal, 
the animal-plant, the animal, man. 

" Chain of beings. — One should not believe 
that the chain of beings is interrupted by the 
diversity of forms; often the form is nothing 
but a deceiving mask, and the link which seems 
to be missing may exist in some known being, 
the true place of which has not yet been assigned 
by the progress of comparative anatomy. This 
way of classifying beings is very laborious and 
slow, and can only be the fruit of successive 
labors by a large number of naturalists. Let us 
wait, and not hasten to judge. 

"Contradictory beings. — They are those the 
organization of which does not agree with the 
rest of the universe. Blind Nature, which cre- 
ates them, exterminates them; it only allows 
those to subsist which are able to coexist sup- 
portably with the general order celebrated by its 
panegyrists" (IX, 253). 

How this elimination took place was the great 
question ; Diderot between 1770 and 1780 gave 
the same general principle as in 1749 : the sur- 
vival of the fittest, through the adaptation of the 
organisms to the needs of beings (IX, 264). 

It should not be hastily surmised, however, 
that Diderot was a direct forerunner of Dar- 



220 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

win. In the long succession of speculative 
thinkers and scientists who prepared the coming 
of Evolution, 33 he occupies an honorable place ; 
he deserves credit for having anticipated in a 
striking manner the formulas of natural science 
in the nineteenth century ; and, while this credit 
should not be minimized, care should be taken 
also that it be not exaggerated. Under the 
direct influence of the works of some contempo- 
raries, 34 as well as that of Lucretius and the 
Greek Atomists, he for over thirty years inde- 
fatigably debated, within himself and with his 
friends, several ideas that attracted him be- 
cause they seemed to have some potential scien- 
tific value: the Empedoclean and Lucretian 
theory of the survival of the fittest, the eternity 
of organic molecules, the Lockian hypothesis of 

83 J. W. Judd, The Coming of Evolution, Cambridge 
University Press, 1910; — H. F. Osborn, From the Greeks 
to Darwin, N. Y., 1894. 

34 All published in the period immediately preceding 
the composition of D'Alembert's Dream: Bonnet, Con- 
templations de la Nature, 1764, and Palingenesie philo- 
sophique ou idees sur Vetat passe et Vetat present des 
etres vivants, 176®; — Eobinet, De la Nature, 1766, and 
Considerations philosophiques sur la gradation naturelle 
des formes de Vetre, 1768"; — lastly, Buffon's transform- 
istie phase may be limited between 1761 and 1766. 






THE SCIENTIST 221 

sentient matter, spontaneous generation, the 
Leibnitzian law of continuity, the reactions of 
functions on organs; in the end he evolved a 
transformistic theory clearer than any to be 
found in Maupertuis and Buffon, a system of 
plausible hypotheses which, although still in- 
tricate and sometimes self-contradictory, was at 
least more positive and more exempt from ludi- 
crous features than the cosmological fancies of 
Bonnet and De Maillet. 

It has been claimed that, for chronological 
reasons, this lucid expression of transf ormism 
by Diderot had been absolutely uninfLuential on 
Lamarck. 35 But enough has been said to show 
that, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, 
transformism as a general theory of life had 
become identified with the thought of the En- 
cyclopedic school. The agitation created by 
Diderot and his circle around that theory must 
have largely contributed to awaken the attention 
of Goethe in Germany, Erasmus Darwin in Eng- 
land, and Lamarck in France, to the necessity 
of throwing more positive light on that great 

35 M. Landrieu, Lamarck, fondateur du transformisme, 
Paris, 1909. 



222 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

issue. 36 Transformism only needed the partial 

scientific confirmation which Lamarck and 

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire gave it in the first two 

decades of the nineteenth century to pass from 

the realm of systematic philosophy into that of 

scientific controversy. Lamarck, who was for 

some time the protege of Buffon, and in 1785 

became a contributor to the Encyclopedie me- 

36 Ch. Darwin, in the Historical Sketch prefixed in 1866 
to The Origin of Species, notes the curious manner in 
which similar ideas concerning the origin of species 
occurred to Goethe, E. Darwin, and Geoff roy Saint- 
Hilaire in 1794-1795. — Oh. Darwin had at first resented 
comparisons between his work and that of Lamarck (see 
his correspondence with Lyell) ; but in 1866 he wrote in 
his Sketch (p. xiv) : "Lamarck was the first man whose 
conclusions on the subject exeited much attention. This 
justly-celebrated naturalist first published his views in 
1801; he much enlarged them in 1809 in his Philosophie 
Zoologique, and subsequently, in 1815, in the Introduc- 
tion to his Histoire Naturelle des Animaux sans Verte- 
bres. In these works he upholds the doctrine that all 
species, including man, are descended from other species. 
He first did the eminent service of arousing attention to 
the probability of all change in the organic, as well as 
in the inorganie world, being the result of law, and not 
of miraculous interposition. f ' It may be said, without 
in any way detracting from Lamarck 's credit for having 
first scientifically formulated transformism, that the 
movement had been prepared for at least half a century 
by the Encyclopedists. 



THE SCIENTIST 223 

thodique, edited by Naigeon and other friends 
of Diderot, eventually founded transformism 
when he subjected it to definite laws. 

Thus, in natural science, Diderot was not so 
much a disciple of English thought as a distant 
and very indirect forerunner of the most momen- 
tous revolution accomplished in science and 
philosophy in the nineteenth century by La- 
marck and Darwin. The idea by which he 
anticipated one of Lamarck's laws, the modifica- 
tion of organs according to the particular activi- 
ties of individuals, was a theme to which he 
often reverted in esthetic criticism, and which we 
shall have occasion again to consider: he called 
it the "metaphysics of drawing" (X, 307). 

Diderot as a scientist achieved little, and fore- 
shadowed a great deal. Had he been a specialist, 
had he known how to confine himself to mathe- 
matics, or chemistry, or natural science, he 
might have rivalled D'Alembert, or Lavoisier, 
or Buffon. But scientific achievements, as well 
as genius itself, are the fruits, as Buffon said, 
of "long patience"; and Diderot's philosophic 
mind was essentially impatient. It always car- 
ried him, against Bacon's precept, above the 



224 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

forest of particulars into the sky of generalities ; 
lie had more of the "proud architect" in him 
than of the "patient artisan." Still, in this 
very incapacity substantially to increase posi- 
tive knowledge, in this instinct of the directions 
which scientific investigation was to follow in 
after times, he was not unlike Francis Bacon. 
With a sincere contempt for unfounded con- 
jectures and systems in science, and a strong 
belief that only through a patient study of con- 
crete reality can human knowledge be increased, 
both worked to destroy philosophic systems pre- 
vailing in their age, and at the same time began 
to frame the more positive systems that were to 
supersede them. 



CHAPTEE V 

THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 

Feancis Bacon, in a short work entitled 
Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation of 
Nature, had cautioned natural philosophers 
against the danger of excessive specialization: 
"... In particular sciences we see that if men 
fall to subdivide their labours, as to be an oculist 
in physic, or to be perfect in some one title of 
the law, or the like, they may prove ready and 
subtile, but not deep or sufficient, no, not in 
that subject which they do particularly attend, 
because of that consent which it hath with the 
rest. And it is a matter of common discourse 
of the chain of sciences how they are linked 
together, insomuch as the Grecians, who had 
terms at will, have fitted it of a name of Circle- 
Learning" (Sped., VI, 43).— This Circle- 
Learning, or Encyclopedic knowledge, was to 
become more and more necessary in the modern 
age, when specialization, with all the evils at- 
tending on it, has become a general and unavoid- 
16 225 



226 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

able practice, while the interest in natural phi- 
losophy, or science, has ceased to be the privilege 
of a few. As it is no longer possible to claim a 
knowledge de omni re scibili, like the famous 
Pico della Mirandola, or Cicero's ideal orator, 
works of general reference have steadily been 
increased and multiplied. 

Of course there had been no dearth of encyclo- 
pedic works or sums of human knowledge since 
Aristotle, especially in the thirteenth century, 
"the century of books bearing the significant 
titles of Summa, or Fniversitas, or Speculum." 1 
In the age of the Renaissance, a book bearing 
for the first time the title of Cyclopaedia had 
been published at Basel by Ringelberg in 1541 ; 
several others had followed, until Alstedius 
published his Latin Encyclopaedia scientiarum 
omnium (1630) shortly after Bacon's death. 
Works of this kind, brought up to date so as to 
include the latest results of scientific researches, 

1 John Morley, Diderot and the Encyclopcedists, vol. I, 
p. 119. We are much indebted to this author's excellent 
review of the encyclopedic idea before the eighteenth 
century, as well as to H. Hallam, Introduction to the 
Literature of Europe (vol. TV), and to the article 
"Encyclopaedia," in the Encyclopcedia Britannica, 11th 
edition. 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 227 

became more necessary than ever towards the 
end of the seventeenth century, when the acces- 
sions to human knowledge since Bacon and 
Alsted had been very considerable. The task, 
though greater, had then become easier. The 
acquisitions of the past were to be found in 
the early encyclopedias which had broken the 
ground; as for the later observations and dis- 
coveries, they were to be collected from a large 
number of learned periodical publications, 
which had their rise in Western Europe in the 
latter half of the seventeenth century. 

For instance, the Academy of Sciences of 
Paris, established in 1666, had by 1700 pub- 
lished ten volumes of Memoirs, mostly on mathe- 
matical subjects. The English Royal Society, 
which may be said to have arisen as early as 
1645, 2 and which was incorporated in 1662, 
had begun on March 1, 1665, the publication of 
its Philosophical Transactions, in which obser- 
vations and experiments held a large place. The 
progress of knowledge was further advanced by 
the first scientific reviews: the Journal des 
Savants, begun in 1665 by Denis de Sallo, of 
2 H. Hallam, op. tit., vol. IV, p. 562. 



228 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

the Parliament of Paris, and continued by 
Gallois ; the Giornale de' Litterati (Borne, 1668), 
and the Giornale Veneto de' Litterati (Venice, 
1671) ; the Leipzig Acts, begun in 1682; while 
many periodicals of general as well as scientific 
interest sprang up in the Netherlands, espe- 
cially after the immigration into that country 
of a large number of learned French Protestants : 
the Mercure Bavant (Amsterdam, 1684) was 
intended to supplement or to rival Vise's more 
literary Mercure Galant, but quickly met a suc- 
cessful competitor in Bayle's Nouvelles de la 
Republique des Lettres (Amsterdam, 1684) ; 
Le Clerc, in Amsterdam, shortly after began to 
issue a series of learned periodicals, the Biblio- 
theque Universelle et Historique from 1686 to 
1693, the Bibliotheque Choisie from 1703 to 
1713, and the Bibliotheque ancienne et moderne 
from 1714 to 1727. Lastly, in this period vast 
compilations appeared which aimed at embody- 
ing information of an encyclopedic nature from 
all these various periodical papers and transac- 
tions: Moreri wrote his Grand Dictionnaire 
historique as early as 1674; Baillet published 
his Jugements des Savants in 1685-1686, 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 229 

Morhof his Polyhistor in 1689, Chauvin his 
Lexicon Rationale sive Thesaurus Philosoph- 
icuSj much used later by Harris and by Brucker, 
in 1692. In the year 1694 appeared Thomas 
Corneille's Didionnaire des arts et des sciences, 
an official supplement to the professedly untech- 
nical Didionnaire de VAcademie frangaise 
which had been rendered necessary by the publi- 
cation of Furetiere's Didionnaire Universel 
(Kotterdam, 1690). Bayle in 1692 undertook 
to correct the mistakes of Moreri, but his under- 
taking resulted in the production of his very 
original and highly successful Didionnaire his- 
torique et critique (1695-1696), the vast store- 
house from which French philosophers borrowed 
much throughout the eighteenth century to wage 
their warfare against dogmaticism. 

The English were no less active in the same 
direction than the Continental compilers. In 
1704 appeared the first volume of a work which 
was less philosophical and historical than the 
compilations of Chauvin and Bayle, and was in 
purpose similar to those of Furetiere and 
Thomas Corneille: this was the " Lexicum 
Technicum, or an Universal English Dictionary 



230 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

of Arts and Sciences, explaining not only the 
terms of art, but the arts themselves," by a fel- 
low of the Eoyal Society, John Harris. 3 The 
second volume followed in 1710. It was prob- 
ably to adapt this book for French readers that 
the French Jesuits, who had printing works at 
Trevoux, near Lyons, began in 1704 the publi- 
cation of the Dictionnaire de Trevoux. The 
novelty of Harris's Lexicum lay in the fact that, 
while other compilations were either mere dic- 
tionaries, or else special encyclopedias which 
concerned themselves only with terms and names 
of history, or philosophy, or belles-lettres, or 
various sciences, this dictionary was universal 
in its scope, and claimed to define not only 
words, but things. John Harris in his Preface 
criticized the labors of his predecessors, to 
whom however he acknowledged that he was 
indebted to no small extent ; he had used, beside 
the periodicals and dictionaries enumerated 
above, special books of reference, like Ozanam's 
Mathematical Dictionary, the Physical and 
Chemical Dictionaries by Johnson, Castellus, 
Blanchard, and many other similar works. 
•London, 1704 and 1710, 2 vols fol. 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 231 

This first of the modern practical encyclo- 
pedias or technical dictionaries enjoyed great 
popularity, having by 1736 run through five 
editions. But it was virtually superseded by 
another work of general reference which ap- 
peared in 1728, written by Ephraim Chambers, 
a free-thinker and scientist, who in 1729 was 
elected a member of the Boyal Society. This 
book, like the Lexicum with which it was in- 
tended to compete, bore its programme on the 
title-page, as follows : " Cyclopcedia, or an Uni- 
versal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, con- 
taining an explication of the terms, and an 
account of the things signified thereby, in the 
several arts, both liberal and mechanical, and 
the several sciences, human and divine; the 
figures, kinds, properties, productions, prepara- 
tions, and uses of things natural and artificial ; 
the rise, progress and state of things ecclesias- 
tical, civil, military, and commercial; with the 
several systems, sects, opinions, . . . among 
Philosophers, Divines, Mathematicians, . . . the 
whole intended as a course of ancient and mod- 
ern learning, extracted from the best authors, 
dictionaries, Journals, Memoirs, Transactions, 



232 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Ephemerides, ... in several languages." 4 It 
was practically the same universal plan as that 
of the Lexicum Technicum, but broadened, and 
improved in one particular : to remedy the more 
or less fragmentary aspect imparted to the work 
by the alphabetical order of the articles, Cham- 
bers had attempted "to consider the several 
matters not only in themselves, but relatively, 
or as they respect each other ; both to treat them 
as so many wholes, and as so many parts of 
some greater whole ; their connexion with which 
to be pointed out by a reference." This idea of 
combining the methodical with the alphabetical 
order, through the system of " references," was 
later taken up again in the Encyclopedie. 

The common fault of both Harris's and 
Chambers's universal dictionaries was obviously 
their comparatively small size: two folio vol- 
umes could not afford adequate space for the 

4 London, 1728 (the preface is dated 1727); 2d edi- 
tion, 1738, 2 vols f ol. ; 3d, 4th, and 5th editions in 1739, 
1741, 1746. — E. Chambers also published a translation 
(with P. Shaw) of A New Method of Chemistry, by H. 
Boerhave, 1727; — the Literary Magazine, London, 1736 
and ff.; — a translation (with J. Martyn) of The Philo- 
sophical History and Memoirs of the Eoyal Academy of 
Sciences, Paris, London, 1742. 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 233 

fulfilment of a plan of complete as well as uni- 
versal information. This appears to have been 
perceived by Ephraim Chambers. In the " Con- 
siderations" prefixed to the second edition of the 
Cyclopaedia, he informs his readers that he had 
planned an encyclopedia on a much broader 
basis than the first; some sheets of it had even 
been printed, when the printers were deterred 
from the undertaking by a bill then about to 
pass in Parliament, "containing a clause to 
oblige the publishers of all improved editions 
of books to print their improvements separately." 
It was doubtful whether one author working 
alone, however learned and industrious he might 
be, could henceforth prove equal to the task of 
summing up the whole of human knowledge. 
In spite of the great success of Chambers's 
Cyclopaedia, or because of it, an attempt was 
made by " a Society of Gentlemen " to bring 
Harris's Lexicum up to date, and to outdo 
Chambers in copiousness both in the text and 
on the title-page. In 1744 was published a 
" Supplement to Dr Harris's Dictionary of Arts 
and Sciences, explaining not only the terms in 
Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, . . . but also the 



234 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

arts and sciences themselves, together with a 
just account of the Origin, Progress and State 
of Things, Offices, Officers, . . . " etc., etc. ; " in 
all which . . . this book is of itself entirely com- 
plete, and more copious and extensive than any 
work of this kind, not excepting Mr. Chambers's 
Cyclopaedia, of which it is a very great improve- 
ment." 5 This book was probably the outcome 
of a booksellers' war. It boasted 1,100 more 
articles than Chambers had, and bitterly attacked 
the Cyclopaedia: Chambers was accused of hav- 
ing pillaged the Lexicum Technicum, besides 
Chauvin's Lexicum Rationale and the Die- 
tionnaire de Trevoux. It was alleged that this 
last compilation had supplied him with three 
fourths of his book. Whatever the indebtedness 
of the free-thinking English encyclopedist may 
have been to the Reverend Fathers of Trevoux, 
and through them of course to Harris and his 
predecessors, the partisans of John Harris 
should have borne in mind that the charge of 
plagiarism loses much of its weight when pre- 
ferred against a compiler. Universal informa- 
tion must needs be borrowed, at least in part; 
"London, 1744, one vol. fol. 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 235 

no man or society of men can invent everything 
anew for the purpose of writing an encyclopedia, 
and, as no work of this kind can claim to be 
complete and final, the main use of each encyclo- 
pedia consists in facilitating the production of 
later works of a similar nature, improved and 
augmented. The bibliography of the works 
which the authors of the Supplement acknowl- 
edged to have used was practically the same set 
of scientific periodicals and dictionaries which, 
growing larger as years went by, had been the 
common source from which Harris, Chambers, 
and many others before and after them freely 
drew. 

The continuators of John Harris, sorely af- 
fected by Chambers's success, pointed out in 
their Preface how the Cyclopaedia, with all its 
plagiarisms, had supplied a certain Grassineau 
with materials for a Dictionnaire de Musique 
(at that time, J.- J. Rousseau was contemplating 
a similar work), and the Chevalier Denis Coetlo- 
gon with An Universal History of Arts and Sci- 
ences, in English; many more books would 
doubtless appear of the same progeny! It was 
indeed the next year (1745) that Diderot un- 



236 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

dertook, on Chambers's plan, an Encyclopedic 
which was destined very much to obscure the 
fame of both Chambers and Harris. 

That a general taste for concrete, useful in- 
formation was prevalent in England during the 
first part of the eighteenth century, coinciding 
with the beginnings of the English industrial 
development, is sufficiently proved not only by 
the success of the Cyclopaedia, and the efforts of 
Chambers's rivals to win the favor of the public 
away from him, but also by the large number 
of other contemporary dictionaries which aimed 
at instructing in things as well as in words. Of 
these we need only mention, because Diderot 
used it, "A New General English Dictionary, 
peculiarly calculated for the use and improve- 
ment of such as are unacquainted with the 
learned languages," etc., begun by the late Kev. 
Mr Thomas Dyche, completed by William Par- 
don, Gent. 6 The French Encyclopedic, on its 
title-page, was declared to be "collected from 
the best authors, and particularly from the Eng- 
lish dictionaries by Chambers, Harris, Dyche, 



6 Of this work we have seen only the 3d edition, Lon- 
don, 1740, 1 vol. 8vo. 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 237 

Together with these English dictionaries and 
encyclopedias, the editor of the Encyclopedie 
naturally used French dictionaries, particularly 
that of Bayle. It has never been inquired 
whether he owed anything to Italian encyclo- 
pedias, like V. M. Coronelli's incomplete Bib- 
lioteca Universale Sacro-profana (1701-1706), 
or G. Pivati's Dizionario Universale (1744) and 
Nuovo Dizionario scientifico e curioso sacro- 
profano (1746-1751), which were published so 
shortly before the Encyclopedie. At any rate, 
he used some German compilations, similar in 
title and purpose to the works already cited, 
which had appeared during the same period: 
possibly J. Hiibner's Reales Staats-Zeitungs und 
Conversations-Lexicon (1704), and J. T. Jab- 
lonski's Allgemeines Lexicon der Kunste und 
Wissenschaften (1721), but certainly J". H. 
Zedler's Grosses vollstdndiges Universal Lexicon 
Aller Wissenschaften und Kiinsten, begun in 
1732, completed in 1750 in 64 volumes. As 
Diderot did not know German, the translation 
of the articles from the German, which were 
mostly on topics of chemistry, was made by an 
anonymous contributor (probably Grimm) who 



238 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

is mentioned in the opening pages of the second 
volume of the Encyclopedic Much was also 
borrowed by Diderot, as will later be shown, 
from Brucker's Historia critica philosophies. 

Excepting this last work on the history of 
philosophy, it may be said that on the whole the 
sources of Diderot's information in the Encyclo- 
pedic, when it was not derived from his own 
observations, were mostly French and English. 
The various collections of Memoirs, Transac- 
tions, and periodicals which we have enumer- 
ated, several technical dictionaries, like that of 
Robert James for medicine, the historical or the 
universal dictionaries of Moreri, Bayle, Harris, 
Chambers, Dyche, lastly the works of Francis 
Bacon, which had just been published in the first 
collection that claimed to be complete (Black- 
bourne edition, London, 4 vols in-fol., 1730), 
served as the foundations of the most monu- 
mental work of the philosophic age in France. 

The eventful history of the Encyclopedic is 
well known. Two foreigners residing in Paris, 
John Mills and Gottfried Sellius, had in 1743 
undertaken to translate Ephraim Chambers's 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST - 239 



Cyclopcedia into French. Their work was com- 
pleted in 1745, and was announced as Encyclo- 
pedie ou Dictionnaire Universel des arts et des 
sciences, to be published by subscription in four 
volumes in-folio, and one volume for the plates 
and indexes. But Mills's ignorance of the 
French formalities relating to privileges for 
printing embroiled him in quarrels with his not 
over-scupulous publisher Lebreton, by whom 
eventually he was robbed of his translation and 
of the profit he might have expected from it. 
What use may have been made of this first trans- 
lation we shall try to ascertain in the discussion 
of the indebtedness of the Encyclopedie to the 
Cyclopcedia. The Abbe du Gua de Malves, a 
queer type of scholar and scientist, was for a 
time made the editor of Mills's translation ; but, 
failing to agree with his fellow-workers, he was 
finally compelled to resign. Then Diderot, who 
was still engaged in translating, with Toussaint 
and Eidous, Eobert James's Medicinal Diction- 
ary, 7 was asked to edit the Cyclopcedia. He 
proposed a vast transformation of the scheme, 

'London, 3 vols fol., 1743-1745; translated as Dic- 
tionnaire universel de medecine, Paris, 6 vols fol., 1746- 
1748. 



240 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 



suggesting that all the most eminent Frenchmen 
in the sciences, arts, and literature should be 
invited to contribute to a large and very full 
Encyclopedic ou Dictionnaire raisonne des arts 
et des sciences , to be published by subscription 
in eight folio volumes, with about 600 plates. 
A privilege was obtained (1746), and the work 
was begun. Through many delays and perse- 
cutions, also because of the great extension of 
the undertaking as it proceeded, the first edition 
of the Encyclopedic was completed only in 1765, 
in 17 volumes in-folio; these were followed by 
11 volumes of plates (1762-1772) containing 
2,888 plates, then by a supplement in 5 volumes 
(1776-1777) with 224 plates. It is not within 
the scope of this study to relate in detail the 
difficulties which attended the publication of the 
Encyclopedic : the hostile intrigues of the Fath- 
ers of Trevoux, the imprisonment of Diderot in 
consequence of the publication of the Letter on 
the Blind, the suppression of the first two vol- 
umes of the Encyclopedic by the King's Council 
(Febr. 9, 1752), the suspension of the enter- 
prise by the Parliament of Paris (March 7, 
1759), the shameless mutilation of the last ten 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 241 

volumes by Lebreton, who was haunted by the 
fear of the Bastille, and the despair of Diderot, 
enraged by such treachery, have been dramatic- 
ally narrated by most biographers of Diderot. 

Diderot had undertaken all the articles relat- 
ing to philosophy and to the mechanical arts, 
beside the wearisome task of filling in whatever 
articles were not undertaken by any of the con- 
tributors. The less technical of these pieces 
have been collected and republished in his 
(Euvres Completes by Assezat and Tourneux 
(vol. XIII— XVII). Furthermore, he wrote a 
Prospectus of the Encyclopedic, while his friend 
and associate D'Alembert wrote a Preliminary 
Discourse, — Looking over these various contri- 
butions, we find in them a strong current of Ba- 
conian thought, particularly in the Prospectus, 
the Preliminary Discourse, and Diderot's article 
on "Art"; the articles on the arts and crafts 
owe very little to English works, but many 
articles on miscellaneous subjects are directly 
borrowed from English sources; the articles on 
philosophy are to a large extent translated from 
Brucker's Latin History of Philosophy. 

Because their undertaking was known to 
17 



242 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

have owed its inception to Chambers's Cyclo- 
paedia, the two editors of the Encyclopedic seem 
to have been anxious to disclaim any indebted- 
ness to the English compilation. The great 
novelty of their encyclopedic plan consisted in 
having conceived the work as collective : the idea 
of mustering all the men of genius or talent of 
one age and country to produce an abstract of 
human knowledge, the philosophic and scientific 
testament of a generation, was Diderot's very 
own. Had it not been for this epoch-making 
innovation in encyclopedia-writing, the Encyclo- 
pedic would be of no more interest to us to-day 
than the translation of James's Medicinal Dic- 
tionary. The scheme offered great difficulties, 
and to some contemporaries it seemed impossible 
of achievement; but Diderot in his Prospectus 
(XIII, 129, n.) answered such doubts with 
Bacon's own words: "De impossibilitate ita 
statuo ; ea omnia possibilia, et praestabilia 
censenda, quae ab aliquibus perfici possunt, 
licet non a quibusvis; et quae a multis con- 
junctim, licet non ab uno ; et quae in successione 
saeculorum, licet non eodem aevo; et denique 
quae multorum cura et sumptu, licet non opibus 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 243 

et industria singulorum." 8 With this great col- 
lective work in view, Diderot had found Cham- 
bers's dictionary, when he had looked it through 
in the translation (XIII, 131), very unsatis- 
factory in many respects. Chambers had bor- 
rowed " without discrimination and discretion " 
from many well-known dictionaries in the 
French language. His treatment of the mechan- 
ical arts was very insufficient ; he was prone to 
discard their technicalities, and did not empha- 
size enough the importance of that branch of 
useful knowledge. His book had only 30 plates, 
whereas the Encyclopedie was to have at least 
600; we have seen that eventually it had 2,888, 
and with the Supplement 3,112 plates. Lastly, 
Chambers in his Preface had given a table or 
"pedigree" of sciences and arts, in rather too 
concise a form, supplementing his enumerations 
with many " etceteras." Diderot pointed to 
D'Alembert's Discourse for a really valuable 
classification of human knowledge, based on 
Bacon's classification, which was not established 

8 Bacon, De Augm. Scient., Lib. II, cap. I, (Sped., II, 
185). Diderot refers to p. 103, which shows that he was 
using the Amsterdam edition, 1662 ; he substitutes ' 1 mul- 
torum" for "publica." 



244 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

according to the objects of the arts and sciences, 
but according to the mental faculties of man. 
The Encyclopedic followed the Cyclopaedia in 
excluding history from its scope, in allowing 
biography only in an incidental way, and in 
making frequent use of " references " in order to 
reconcile the methodical with the alphabetical 
order. 

Having escaped the possible charge of having 
performed a mere adaptation of Chambers's 
Cyclopaedia, Diderot and D'Alembert were ac- 
cused of having plagiarized Bacon. As far as 
their classification of sciences is concerned, this 
charge is plainly absurd. Diderot took the 
trouble to refute these malevolent suggestions 
in some Observations on the Chancellor Bacon's 
Division of Sciences joined to his Prospectus 
(XIII, 159-164). He had indeed written 
in the Prospectus: "If we have successfully 
emerged from this vast operation (of the classi- 
fication of sciences), our principal debt will be 
to the Chancellor Bacon, who sketched the plan 
of a universal dictionary of the sciences and 
arts at a time when there were not, so to say, 
either arts or sciences. That extraordinary 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 245 

genius, being unable to make the history of 
what was known, wrote the history of what 
should be learned" (XIII, 133-134). But 
now he had to show that indebtedness was not 
synonymous with a servile translation of Bacon's 
words. The truth is, that the two classifications 
of sciences illustrate in a striking manner the 
progress accomplished in the sciences between 
1600 and 1750. The new division of medicine 
was from Boerhave ; the rather antiquated classi- 
fication of the physical sciences given by Bacon 
had been entirely recast ; and the places of sev- 
eral sciences or arts, such as Music and Painting, 
put by Bacon under Medicine as belonging to 
the Science of Pleasure, had been altered. 

On the subject of the dignity of the mechan- 
ical arts, or trades, the indebtedness of Diderot 
to Bacon is obvious, and, far from attempting 
to conceal it, he emphasized it by many quota- 
tions from the English philosopher. Yet the 
relentless enemies of the Encyclopedie made the 
most of what he himself told them, and tried at 
once to spread the belief that his article on 
"Art," which he had sent as a specimen to the 
Jesuit Pere Berthier, of the Journal de Trevoux, 



246 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

was copied verbatim from Bacon. A translation 
of a part of this article will show that Diderot, 
advocating with Bacon the necessity of bestow- 
ing more attention on the useful arts and crafts, 
in other words, of developing Applied Sciences 
by a closer alliance between the speculative and 
the practical activities of man, united in one 
strong plea ideas, examples, and quotations from 
various writings of the leading spirit of scientific 
thought whose authority he acknowledged : 

A distinction, he wrote, has early been estab- 
lished between the liberal and the mechanical 
arts. " This distinction, although well founded, 
has had a bad effect, in debasing some very 
worthy and useful people, and strengthening in 
us I know not what natural laziness, which was 
already impelling us but too strongly to believe 
that to apply ourselves steadily and constantly 
to experiments and to particular, material ob- 
jects of our senses was to derogate from the 
dignity of the human mind, and that to practise 
or even to study the mechanical arts was to stoop 
to things the research of which is laborious, the 
meditation base, the exposition difficult, the 
handling disgraceful, the number inexhaustible, 
and the value trifling. Minui majestatem m entis 
humanoe, si in experimentis et rebus particulars 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 247 

bus, etc. (Bacon, Novum Organum). 9 A preju- 
dice which might tend to fill the cities with 
proud disputers and useless contemplators, and 
the country with petty tyrants full of ignorance, 
idleness, and disdain. Not thus thought Bacon, 
one of the foremost geniuses of England; nor 
Colbert, one of the greatest ministers of France ; 
nor the sound minds and wise men of all ages. 
Bacon considered the history of the mechanical 
arts as the most important branch of true philos- 
ophy; 10 he therefore took good care not to 
despise their practise. Colbert considered the 
nation's industry and the establishment of manu- 
factures as the safest wealth of a kingdom. 
According to those who to-day have sound no- 
tions of the value of things, the man who 
peopled France with engravers, painters, sculp- 
tors, and artists of every kind, who snatched 
from the English the secret of the stocking-loom, 
who took the velvets from the Genoese, the 
looking-glasses from the Venetians, did hardly 
less for the State than the men who beat its 

9 Nov. Org., I, Aphor. 83: "Minui nempe mentis 
humanse majestatem, si experiments et rebus particu- 
laribus, sensui subjectis et in materia determinatis, diu 
ac multum versetur: praesertim quum hujusmodi res ad 
inquirendum laboriosae, ad meditandumi ignobiles, ad 
dieendum asperse, ad practicam illiberales, numero in- 
finite, et subtilitate tenues esse soleant. ' ' — Same thought, 
in a slightly different form, in Cogitata et Visa (Sped., 
VII, 114) and in Filum Labyrinthi (Sped., VI, 427). 

10 Nov. Org., I Aphor. 29. 



248 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

enemies and took their strongholds by storm; 
and, in the eyes of the philosopher, there may 
be more real credit in having given rise to the 
Le Bruns, Le Sueurs, and Audrans, in having 
had the battles of Alexander painted and en- 
graved, and the successes of our generals worked 
in tapestries, than there had been in winning 
those victories. Put on one side of the scales 
the real advantages of the most sublime sciences 
and of the most honored arts, and on the other 
side those of the mechanical arts, and you will 
find that the esteem in which the ones and the 
others have been severally held has not been 
granted in a just proportion to those advantages, 
and that more praise has been given to the men 
who were busy in making us believe that we were 
happy than to the men who were concerned in 
causing us to be really happy. How queer our 
judgments are ! We require that people should 
be usefully employed, and we despise useful 
men" (XIII, 361). 

Then, in the spirit of the Novum Organum 
and the other works of Bacon " on the interpre- 
tation of nature," which, as we have seen, were 
at the same time inspiring his own Pensees sur 
V interpretation de la nature, Diderot suggests 
that a complete treatise of the mechanical arts 
should be written : 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 249 

" And let no one imagine that these are vain 
ideas which I propose, or that I promise chimer- 
ical discoveries to men. Having remarked, with 
a philosopher whom I am never weary of prais- 
ing because I have never grown weary of read- 
ing him, that the history of nature is incomplete 
without that of the arts, and having invited 
naturalists to crown their work on the vegetable, 
mineral, animal kingdoms, and so forth, by the 
experiments of the mechanical arts, the knowl- 
edge of which is of great importance to true 
philosophy, I shall dare add with him : Ergo rem 
quam ago,non opinionem, sed opus esse; eamque 
non sectce alicujus, out placiti, sed utilitatis 
esse et amplitudinis immensce fundamenta. 11 
This is not a system, nor a man's fanciful 
imaginings ; these are the verdicts of experience 
and reason, and the foundations of an immense 
edifice ; and whoever shall think differently shall 
seek to make the sphere of our knowledge nar- 
rower and to discourage men's minds. We owe 
to chance a large number of the things we know ; 
it has offered us many important things which 
we were not seeking: is it to be presumed that 
we shall find nothing, when we add our efforts 
to its caprice, and put some order and method 
in our researches? 12 If at present we possess 

u Cogitata et Visa (Sped., VII, 140). A slightly 
different version is to be found in the preface of the 
Instauratio Magna (Sped., I, 210). 

"Bacon, On the Adv. of Learning (Sped., VI, 261- 
262) ; Nov. Org., I, Aph. 7. 



250 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

some secrets for which formerly no man was 
hoping, and if from the past we are allowed to 
draw conjectures, why should not the future 
have riches in store for us which we hardly 
expect to-day? Had anyone, a few centuries 
ago, told those who measure the possibility of 
things by the scope of their intellects, and who 
imagine nothing beyond what they know, that 
there is a certain powder which blasts rocks, 
which overthrows the thickest walls from amaz- 
ing distances, and a few pounds of which, 
enclosed within the deep entrails of the earth, 
shakes them, makes its way through the enor- 
mous masses which cover it, and may open an 
abyss in which a whole city could disappear, 
those people would not have failed to compare 
those effects to the action of the wheels, pulleys, 
levers, weights, and other known machines, and 
to pronounce that such a powder is chimerical, 
and that only lightning, or the cause which pro- 
duces earthquakes through an inimitable mech- 
anism, is capable of producing those frightful 
prodigies. 13 Thus spoke that great philosopher 
to his age and to all the ages to come. We shall 
add, to follow his example: How many silly 
arguments would have arisen concerning the 
project of that machine for raising water by 
13 Directly from Nov. Org., I, Aphor. 109-110, and less 
directly from Aphor. 129 and the Cogitata et Visa 
(Sped., VII, 134). 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 251 

fire, 14 as it was for the first time constructed in 
London, especially if the author of the machine 
had been modest enough to represent himself as 
a man of little skill in mechanics ? If the world 
was peopled only with such appreciators of in- 
ventions, neither great nor small things could be 
accomplished. Let those therefore who hasten 
to decide concerning works which imply no con- 
tradiction, which sometimes are merely slight 
additions to some known machines, and which at 
most require a skilled workman, let those who 
are so narrow-minded as to deem those works 
impossible be aware that they themselves know 
too little even to make reasonable wishes. The 
Chancellor Bacon tells them so: 15 Qui sumpta, 
or what is even less pardonable, qui neglecta ex 
his quce proesta sunt conjectura, ea aut impos- 
sibility, aut minus verisimilia, putetj eum scire 
debere se non satis doctum, ne ad optandum 
quidem commode et apposite esse" (XIII, 
364-365). 

Eeverting to the subject of the bright antici- 
pations of future progress in science which are 
warranted by marvelous discoveries in the past, 
Diderot again takes up three favorite illustra- 

14 This is the steam engine invented by Capt. Thomas 
Savery (1698), described and illustrated by John Harris 
in his Lexicum, article " Engine.' ' 

16 Cogitata et Visa (Sped., VII, 135). Diderot adds 
"qui neglecta' ' to Bacon's text. 



252 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

tions from Bacon: 16 "With the English philos- 
opher, I shall dwell on three inventions of which 
the ancients had no knowledge, and the authors 
of which (be it said to the shame of modern 
history and poetry) are almost unknown: I 
mean the art of printing, the discovery of gun- 
powder, and of the property of the magnetic 
needle" (XIII, 370). At a time when the 
identity of lightning with the electricity gener- 
ated in laboratories was being demonstrated, 
and, as we have seen, the identity of magnetic 
and electric phenomena was at least conjectured, 
when chemistry as a science was coming into 
existence, and when, especially in England, 
most of the trades underwent those great trans- 
formations and improvements which brought 
about modern industrialism, Bacon's prophecies 
seemed more than ever pregnant with truth. 
The first steam engines, the mechanical looms, 
the improved methods of tillage, which were 
about to revolutionize English life, appeared as 
so many proofs of the beneficial results which 
Bacon had expected from the alliance of thought 
and "works," the natural philosopher and the 
"Cogitata et Visa (Sped., VII, 130) ; etc. 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 253 

artisan, the scientific and the practical activities 
of mankind. 

Such is the broad significance of Diderot's 
enthusiastic praises of the mechanical arts, and 
of his unbounded admiration for Bacon. His 
article on "Art" concludes with a perhaps ill- 
advised invitation to the liberal arts to celebrate 
the hitherto despised useful arts, instead of 
singing their own praises for ever. Such philo- 
sophic poems have often been attempted, both 
before and since Diderot's time, with indifferent 
success. The encyclopedist further invited 
kings to protect the useful trades, according to 
one of the wisest traditions of the French mon- 
archy ; he begged the scientists not too readily to 
condemn inventions as useless, and asked the 
artisans to take advice from the scientists, to 
become communicative, so as not to deprive 
society of those valuable secrets which they 
might have chanced to discover, and not to be- 
lieve, on the other hand, that their respective 
arts had reached the utmost degree of perfection. 

The son of the skilled cutler of Langres was 
better fitted than any other man in France at 
that time to understand and to propagate the 



254 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

practical meaning of Bacon's message. While 
D'Alembert in the Discours preliminaire had 
paid a glowing tribute to Bacon as the master of 
true philosophy, that is, Natural Philosophy or 
Science, and had improved his division of sci- 
ences into a classification which stood unrivalled 
until Auguste Comte's, the indebtedness of Di- 
derot to Bacon, both in the Pensees sur Vinter- 
pretation de la nature and in the Encyclopedic 
(particularly in the article "Art"), may be 
summed up under two heads: practical advice 
for the advancement of scientific knowledge, and 
directions for the improvement of the practical 
arts of life. No man could be less inclined than 
Diderot to consider the practical side of life as 
mean or ignoble ; no man in his age showed more 
genuine interest in all that pertained to the mill 
and the workshop. In our age of technical 
schools and technical books, encyclopedia editors 
no longer have to turn into workmen for days 
together; but Diderot certainly enjoyed that 
practical side of his study of the mechanical arts. 
Withal he was not, any more than Bacon, a nar- 
row utilitarian. The applications of science, 
though very important in themselves, did not 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 255 

seem to him more important than science itself : 
pure science, disinterested knowledge must re- 
main the common aim of all true philosophers. 
" The true way of philosophizing," to quote once 
more Diderot's very Baconian Thought, " should 
have been and should be to apply the under- 
standing to the understanding ; the understand- 
ing and experiment, to the senses ; the senses, to 
nature; nature, to the investigation of instru- 
ments; instruments, to the research and im- 
provement of arts, which would be thrown to 
the common people to teach them to respect 
philosophy." 

Now, English thought since Bacon had been, 
with few exceptions, essentially practical. The 
Koyal Society for a century had worked along 
the lines indicated by the author of the Novum 
Orgwmxm, while the awakening of the industrial 
spirit had brought into being a large number of 
useful appliances and an ever-growing host of 
practical inventors. Indeed France had not 
been behind in devising new instruments and 
machines for the improvement of manufactures 
and the greater comfort of life : the products of 



265 -DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

her industry in the eighteenth centnr y were ex- 
ported into all parts of Europe, and still serve 
as models to manufacturers in the twentieth cen- 
tury. With all the secrets of the national indus- 
tries Diderot indefatigably tried to get a first- 
hand acquaintance. We might expect him also 
abundantly to have used English works regard- 
ing the progress of the arts and crafts in Eng- 
land. Unfortunately, works of that kind were 
scarce, and the contemporary English encyclo- 
pedias gave little or none of the practical infor- 
mation which he sought. Harris and Chambers 
had devoted more attention to the sciences and 
arts properly so-called, and had been content to 
give historical instead of descriptive accounts 
of the trades. An accurate description of the 
processes and the products of industry in all its 
branches was the want which Diderot made it 
his task to supply. We shall presently see, in a 
few concrete instances from the Encyclopedic, 
how he added the result of his original re- 
searches to the historical disquisitions of his 
predecessors. 

For the second part of his programme as con- 
tributor to the Encyclopedic, namely the articles 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 257 

on philosophy, Diderot found little to satisfy 
him in Chambers. He went to Bayle and other 
sources; above all he borrowed largely, as we 
shall show, from a bulky Latin work by the 
Hanoverian Jacob Brucker, member of the 
Eoyal Society of Berlin: his Historia Critica 
Philosophic had appeared at Leipzig (1742- 
1744) in four volumes (five tomes), with a 
" sixth volume " of Supplement in 1767. The 
work was dedicated to George II, "regi ac 
domino meo." Of course, our consideration of 
Diderot's indebtedness to Brucker will not be 
based merely on this allegiance so proudly 
acknowledged by the German historian of philos- 
ophy, but on the fact that much of the learning 
apparently derived by Diderot in his articles on 
philosophy from English works came to him 
through Brucker's book. 

To begin with Diderot's articles on the sci- 
ences, arts, and trades. Earlier in this chapter 
it has been seen how the article on " Art," which 
was printed separately in 1751 and launched as 
a specimen, after the Prospectus of 1750, was 
made original by Diderot's development of the 
18 



258 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

section concerning "mechanical arts" imbued 
throughout with the spirit of Bacon. The treat- 
ment of " Agriculture " was in a similar man- 
ner enlarged and transformed, from the meagre, 
untechnical articles in Chambers on "Earth," 
"Soil," "Tilling," etc., by a liberal use of 
Jethro Tull's works, 17 first collected in one edi- 
tion in 1743. Diderot strongly advocated the 
Tullian method, praised Duhamel's work in 
the same direction, and invited the great and 
the rich to improve the agriculture of the king- 
dom by experiments. Voltaire and the Marechal 
de Noailles were among the first disciples of 
Tull in France, and two years after Diderot's 
article had appeared the works of Tull were i 
translated into French (1753). 

Another example will show how Diderot sup- j 

17 Jethro Tull (1674-1741) observed method® of tillage 
in France and Italy, 1711-1714; published his Horse- 
Hoing Husbandry, 1731; again, The Horse-Hoing Hus- 
bandry, or an Essay on the Principles of Tillage and 
Vegetation, 1733; replied to attacks in a Supplement to 
the Essay . . ., 1735; Addenda, 1738; Conclusion, 1739. 
The whole was collected in a 2d edition, 1743; 3d edition, 
1751; republished with alterations by William Gobbett, 
1822. Two undertakings to translate his works into 
French were blended into one by Duhamel, from 1753 
to 1757, with commentaries. 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 259 

plied the absence of technical books by his direct 
observations. Under the article " Stocking/' 
Chambers had mentioned the stocking-loom, 
discussed the French and English claims to its 
invention, giving the credit of it to a French- 
man, and concluded by stating that the machine 
was too complicated for description. This was 
characteristic of the deficiency of earlier encyclo- 
pedias which Diderot intended to remedy. 18 
By him the stocking-loom was not so lightly 
dismissed : he went to see it, had it explained to 
him, learned to work it, then had its very numer- 
ous parts designed and engraved, and wrote a 
full article and the explanatory text of the 
plates. In substituting this thorough and pains- 
taking method of work for that of mere com- 
pilation, he was the initiator of all succeeding 
encyclopedias worthy of the name. For what 

18 A quotation will show how startling this deficiency 
was, which had struck Diderot so much: "A frame or 
machine made of polished iron," Chambers had written; 
"the structure whereof is exceedingly ingenious, but 
withal exceedingly complex, so that it were very difficult 
to describe it well, by reason of the diversity and num- 
ber of its parts; nor is it even conceived, without a deal 
of difficulty, when working before the face." (Cyclo- 
paedia, article "Stocking-Loom.") 



260 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

should we think to-day of an encyclopedia in 
which we found, for instance, a definition and a 
history of the locomotive, or the turbine, or the 
automobile, or the aeroplane motor, followed by 
a statement that such machines are too compli- 
cated to be described ? 

At other times, Chambers's articles are en- 
livened with unexpected additions of a philo- 
sophic nature which are Diderot's very own. 
Under the word "Aigle," Diderot faithfully 
transcribes the whole of Chambers's article 
"Eagle," treated from the point of view of 
ornithology and mythology; he adds some par- 
ticulars from Willoughby's Ornithology ; and, 
on his way, blending the wish to conciliate the 
temporal and spiritual powers of the land with 
a strong inclination to laugh at them in their 
faces, he relinquishes the bird of Jove and the 
fable of Ganymede to exclaim: "A hundred 
times happy is the people to whom religion 
offers nothing to believe but true, sublime, and 
holy things, nothing to imitate but virtuous 
actions! Such a one is ours, in which the 
philosopher needs but to follow his reason to 
arrive at the foot of our altars." 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 261 

Chambers's humor occasionally ran in a vein 
comparable to that of Bayle or Voltaire. Speak- 
ing of "Butter/' he notes that Schookius, De 
butyro et aversione casei, has wondered whether 
Abraham knew butter, and, if he did, whether 
that was not precisely the food with which he 
treated the angels who came to visit him. Di- 
derot (article "Beurre") found the whole piece 
too good not to be inserted, with Schookius's 
name and the title of his valuable book. Then 
he proceeded to give the more essential infor- 
mation which Chambers had neglected, namely, 
the methods in use for making butter. 

Some other curiosities, fraught with more 
scientific interest, also passed bodily from the 
Cyclopcedia into the Encyclopedic. Such for 
instance is the collection of cases of people who 
had swallowed fruit-stones, pins, etc., collected 
by Chambers (article "Swallowing") from 
the Philosophical Transactions. The article 
"Avaler" reproduces the English text and ref- 
erences word for word, yet with some puzzling 
inaccuracies : for instance, " a lad sixteen years 
of age," who was reported to have swallowed a 
needle which later came out of his shoulder, 



262 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

I 
unaccountably becomes " une fille agee de dix [ 
ans," and the " docteur Christ Weserton " is the j 
French rendering of "Dr Christ. Wesenon," 
who had reported the case. 

In truth, these blunders and the reckless 
method of plagiarism which the most casual 
comparison of the Encyclopedie with the Cyclo- 
pcedia will suffice to lay bare are not exactly 
chargeable to Diderot. What is wholly bor- 
rowed from Chambers or some one else, and 
published by Diderot " as editor/' not "as 
author/' is marked with an asterisk; but how 
can the distinction be made between the editor 
and the author when, as is often the case, Di- 
derot adds long developments of his own to the 
borrowed matter? These developments gener- 
ally being of a technical nature, a strange result 
has occurred : what is really Chambers's text, in 
many articles, has been reprinted in Diderot's 
CEuvres Completes, the reprint often stopping 
exactly where Diderot's own share, the tech- 
nical, begins. In the case of articles wholly or 
almost wholly taken from the Cyclopcedia, such 
as " Anagramme," " Avaler," " Beurre," " Ono- 
mancie," etc., Diderot may have been guilty of 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 263 

negligence in allowing the membra disjecta of 
Mills's translation to find their way whole and 
unaltered, yet with inaccuracies, to the printing- 
press. He may have been unable to collate them 
all, before or after printing, with the English 
original, if indeed he was always aware of their 
origin when he found them among his papers. 
Still, when every allowance is made for the 
difficulties of his editorial task, it must be 
acknowledged that he was naturally inclined to 
be as free a borrower as he was a generous 
lender. It is certain that, on subjects of minor 
importance, those mere curiosities of science, 
erudition, or history which had served to enliven 
preceding encyclopedias, he never scrupled to 
copy English articles literally. 

In proof of this, a few examples will suffice. 
The article "Albadara" (the Arabic name of 
the sesamoid bone of the first joint of the big 
toe), containing medical cases which tended to 
prove that the amputation of that bone cured 
convulsions, is wholly taken from Robert 
James's Medicinal Dictionary. On the sect of 
the Seekers (article " Chercheurs " ) , there is a 
free transcription from the French Dictionnaire 



264 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

historique of Moreri. The recipe for writing) 
Pindaric odes (article "Pindarique") is liter- 
ally from Chambers, as well as the statement 
that Cowley is the best English Pindaric poet. 
Chambers's paragraph on the Society for the 
Propagation of the Gospel, under the general 
heading " Society," supplies the material of the 
article "Propagation de l'Evangile," the spirit 
of which is unmistakably Diderot's, from the 
vehemence of a denunciation of the presump- 
tion and interference of missionaries in foreign 
lands, with which the article concludes, and of 
which there is not one word in Chambers. On 
the other hand, the English article on " Proph- 
ecy" is much bolder than the French article 
" Prophetie," which is inspired from it but 
evidently toned down. Another article bor- 
rowed from Chambers and much enlarged in 
the Encyclopedic may be said to have indirectly 
brought about the first outburst of persecution 
against that work, in 1752. Of "Certitude" 
Chambers had distinguished three kinds: the 
metaphysical, the physical, and the moral. 
Concerning this last, he had quoted some fig- 
ures from the Philosophical Transactions tend- 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 265 

ing to show how the certainty of a fact was 
bound to dwindle to nothing through oral trans- 
mission, in a ratio corresponding to the number 
of successive transmitters. To this calculation, 
apparently dangerous for religious tradition, 
Diderot subjoined an extensive dissertation by 
the Abbe de Prades, his friend, combating both 
the English mathematician who had thus criti- 
cized the reliability of oral tradition and some 
of Diderot's sceptical Pensees philosophiques 
on the same subject. The friendliness between 
the philosopher and his orthodox opponent was 
obvious, and was soon after used to implicate 
both in trouble, on the occasion of De Prades's 
thesis in the Sorbonne. 

The article " Resurrection " in the Encyclo- 
pedie, though wholly taken from Chambers, yet 
bears clear traces of Diderot's hand. Chambers 
writes: "The great argument for the truth of 
Christianity, and that urged with the most force 
and conviction for the same, is drawn from the 
resurrection of Our Saviour. — The circumstan- 
ces thereof are such as almost admit of a demon- 
stration ; which has accordingly been attempted 
on the strict principles of the geometricians. 



266 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

See Ditton on the resurrection/' This passage 
is followed by philosophic objections, rather 
strongly put, with replies to the objections, and 
a reference to the article "Identity," inspired 
from Locke. Diderot translates with a freedom 
that verges on inaccuracy, as will better appear 
in the French text: "L' argument qu'on tire de 
sa resurrection (de Jesus-Christ) en faveur de 
la verite de la religion chretienne est un de 
ceux qui pressent avec le plus de force et de 
conviction. Les circonstances en sont telles, 
qu'elles portent ce point jusqu'a la demonstra- 
tion, suivant la methode des geometres, comme 
Ditton Fa execute avec succes." But all this 
orthodox emphasis is amply counterbalanced in 
the sequel by an equal or greater emphasis laid 
on Chambers's objections; a similar reference 
to the article "Identite" brings the reader to 
another less close borrowing from the Cyclo- 
pcedia. 

Many of the articles of Diderot on the me- 
chanical arts would show that it was his con- 
stant practice to start from the Cyclopcedia, to 
make a few additions on the way, and, when the 
technical part was too deficient in Chambers, 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 267 

to enter into very full developments of his own. 
The articles "Email/' " Carrosse," "Livre" 
are good examples of his method; let ns con- 
sider his retouches in the last two of these. The 
article " Carrosse n has been partly reprinted 
in the latest edition of the GEuvres; the article 
" Livre " will be found in volume IX of the 
Encyclopedie. In " Carrosse/' the historical in- 
formation is from Chambers (article "Coach"), 
the technical is by Diderot. To the legal Lon- 
don cab-fares, as established by Statute 14 Car. 
II — which becomes in French "le quatrieme 
statut de Charles II" — Diderot adds for com- 
parison the fares of public carriages in Paris. 
His practical mind leads him to suggest the 
appointment of an official to receive the fares 
and start the coaches, as a means of preventing 
the drivers from fleecing the public and de- 
frauding their employers. As Pascal in the 
seventeenth century had conceived the modern 
notion of omnibuses, Diderot in the eighteenth 
came very near an idea that is more modern 
still, that of taximeters. — The article "Livre" 
closely follows Chambers's article " Book." To 
distinguish a "book" from a "volume," a dis- 



268 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

creet little advertisement is here inserted by 
Diderot: " UHistoire de la Grece de Temple 
Stanyan est un fort bon livre, divise en trois 
petits volumes." The references of Chambers 
are copied, sometimes simplified, at the risk of 
misleading the reader. To the German boast, 
recorded by Chambers, of the excellence of their 
learned catalogues, Diderot retorts by giving an 
imposing list of French scholars. A blunder 
slips in which cannot be ascribed to Mills in the 
translation of the following passage : Cyclopaedia 
— "As flexible matters came to be wrote on, 
they (the ancients) found it more convenient to 
make their books in form of rolls "; Encyclo- 
pedic — "Quand les anciens avaient des matieres 
un pen longues a traiter, ils se servaient plus 
commodement de feuilles ou de peaux cousues 
les unes au bout des autres, qu'on nommait 
rouleaux." On the other hand, it is hard to 
believe that Diderot could have been so ignorant 
or so careless as to translate Chambers's refer- 
ence " Vid. Nouv. Eep. Lett., T. 39, p. 427," 
by "Voyez la nouv. republ. des Lettres, tome 
XXXIX, p. 427." The models given by 
Chambers for bookkeeping are copied with 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 269 

trifling alterations, but the main body of the 
article which follows this paragraph is more 
freely treated. 

To sum up, Diderot was right when he had 
written in his Prospectus: "Chambers has read 
books, but hardly seen any artisans; yet there 
are many things which can only be learnt in the 
workshops." These things Diderot spared no 
trouble to learn. For the rest, he mostly relied 
on Chambers ; all the articles or part of articles 
of miscellaneous information which he found 
satisfactory in the Cyclopaedia were appropria- 
ted by him, with very slight alterations, for the 
Encyclopedic He may sometimes have used 
fragments of Mills's translation, with or with- 
out the knowledge of their origin. But there is 
enough evidence in his additions, emendations, 
and defective translations, that he often had re- 
course himself to the Cyclopaedia. The stricter 
views of our age concerning literary honesty may 
lead us to regret that in those cases the name of 
Chambers was not more often quoted in the col- 
umns of the Encyclopedic, and that the acknowl- 
edgment of the indebtedness of the French to 
the English work was almost confined to the 



270 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

title-page. It should however be remembered 
that eighteenth-century ideas on this subject 
were broader than ours, for at that time the 
notion of literary property was hardly in exist- 
ence, especially in respect to works of this kind ; 
and of international copyright there was of 
course no question. 

Diderot's free method of dealing with infor- 
mation gathered by other people attracted in- 
deed some notice in his own age : not in relation 
to the Cyclopaedia, but to Brucker's Ilistoria 
Critica Philosophice , the substance and the lan- 
guage of which were more familiar to the 
learned. In 1773, the Nouvelles Litteraires of 
Berlin accused Diderot of having stolen his 
articles on the history of philosophy from 
Brucker's book. 19 He had acknowledged that 
he owed something to that " excellent work," as 
well as to the Histoire de la philosophie by 
Deslandes (article "Philosophie"; (Euv. } XVI, 
280). But can such a passing reference be 
judged sufficient, when it is true that a large 
number of Diderot's articles on philosophy are 

19 See M. Tourneux, "Diderot et Catherine II, Paris, 
1899, p. 527, note. 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 271 

but extracts or abstracts from Brucker's pon- 
derous History •? 

To begin at the very beginning, Diderot bad 
an article on the " Philosophic antediluvienne," 
discussing the thesis of some historians of philo- 
sophy who, probably for the sake of thorough- 
ness, had formed a philosophy of Adam and his 
progeny down to !N"oah. This, except a few ad- 
ditions, and a digression on the Essay on Virtue 
or Merit, is from one of the early chapters of 
Brucker. It seems to be, like Schookius's De 
Butyro, a topic adduced rather for the entertain- 
ment than for the instruction of the reader, as 
Brucker himself had been gay over it all. The 
article on Arabic philosophy ("Arabes — Etatde 
la philosophic chez les anciens Arabes") learn- 
edly quotes the names of Hottinguer, Pocock, 
Hyde, "le docte Spencer," and expatiates on the 
subject of Zabianism, or the worship of celestial 
bodies. It is a resume, luckily made lighter and 
almost readable, of Brucker' s chapter " De phi- 
losophia veterum Arabum," down to paragraph 
9 (Hist. crit. phil, vol. I, pp. 213-228), from 
which " doctus Spencerus " and his fellows have 
passed into the French. One cannot help remark- 
ing on the way that the unfortunate translator 



272 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

turns " Islamismus " into "Islamime," mistak- 
ing a common designation of the Mohammedan 
religion for the name of its founder. Again, what 
the Encyclopedic offers concerning Chaldaic 
philosophy, the Mosaic and Christian philos- 
ophy (articles " Juifs" and "Mosaique"), and 
other less familiar fields of human thought, 
comes from the same source. 20 In the examina- 
tion of the attempts made by some writers to 
reconcile Christian beliefs with rationalism, 
Brucker is more painstaking, Diderot more 
petulant. " Je ne sais ce que Bigot a pretendu 
. . . ," he exclaims impatiently (XVI, 125) ; 
and indeed nobody knows, except Bayle, who 
alone had read Bigot and been used by Brucker 
for information. 21 So that on the whole we 
come to wonder what Feverlinus, Glassius, 
Zeisoldius, Valesius, Bochartus, Scheuchzerus, 
Grabovius, etc., have to do with us and with an 

20 For Diderot's articles on the "Romains et Etrus- 
ques," see Brucker, vol. I, pp. 342 ff., and II, pp. 7-70; 
— " San-asms," Vol. Ill, pp. 3 ff. (the poetical frag- 
ment from Sadi on p. 209) ;— ' ' Chaldeens, ' ' vol. I, pp. 
10'2 ff.;— "Chinois," vol. V, pp. 846 ff.;— etc. 

21 Brucker, vol. IV, p. 614, declares that he relies on 
Bayle concerning Bigot's book, "ut hunc librum saepius 
qusesitum invenire non potuimus. ' ' 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 273 

Encyclopedie designed to make learning popu- 
lar, especially when Diderot stops short in his 
enumeration to leave out the embarrassing name 
of " Bossuetus." In all these pages he follows 
Brucker ("Philosophia Hebraeorum," vol. II, 
pp. 653 ff., and "De Philosophicis Mosai'cis et 
Christianis," vol. IV, pp. 610 6°.), to the end of 
his review of the principles of Comenius. Was 
it worth while to inform the readers of the Erv- 
cyclopedie of the existence of so many obscure 
writers, even for the sake of having a fling at 
Dickenson and Burnet because they had en- 
deavored to reconcile Genesis with modern 
science? Diderot's encyclopedic consciousness 
went at times a little far. 

It must of course be allowed that on such 
questions it was much better for him to adapt 
the work of a specialist to his own ends, and to 
make it readable to all, than to waste his time 
in a personal investigation of matters deservedly 
forgotten. But, when the question is about the 
greater schools or systems of philosophy, the 
situation is different. While there is hardly 
any disgrace in translating Brucker's Latin on 
such topics as the philosophy of Enoch, or of 
19 



274 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

the Jews after the Captivity (" Philosophia | 
Hebrseorum post captivitatem Babylonicam 
nulla/' we are told, vol. II, p. 653), or the | 
systems of the Scythians, the Saracens, and the 1 
Chinese, it is hardly excusable in a professed j 
philosopher to resort to the same method in I 
relation to Eclecticism, Epicurism, Platonism, | 
or the systems of Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, i 
and Locke. 

Now, with the exception of the articles on *f 
Leibnitz and Spinoza, almost everything that 
Diderot writes concerning modern philosophy 
is freely compiled from Brucker. It often 
happens of course that original reflections usher 
in the topic treated, or are mingled in its de- 
velopment. But, for the biographies of philos- J 
ophers, modern as well as ancient, it is Diderot's |:| 
constant practice to translate Brucker in a cur- n 
sory way, as he used to translate Shaftesbury, M 
leaving out lengthy developments, tedious dis- \] 
cussions of authorities, and generally whatever I 
would be of no interest to the average reader, f 
Whenever also an abstract of a philosophy is D 
given, in the shape of brief propositions (some- ; 
times, but not always, numbered), we are in f 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 275 

presence of Brucker's own work, which in such 
cases always affects the form of short para- 
graphs. The only difference is, that Brucker 
regularly begins by outlining the life, then pro- 
ceeds with the system of a given philosopher; 
Diderot occasionally inverts this order, as in 
the articles " Eclectisme," " Epicurisme," 22 but 
the substance remains the same. 

A more distinctive difference between Di- 
derot and Brucker is, that while the German 
historian is generally objective and impersonal 
in his estimate of philosophic systems, the En- 
cyclopedist perpetually tends to a very subjective 
kind of appreciation. Eor instance, Eclecticism 
with him becomes the philosophy of all sound 
thinkers, and is made synonymous with ration- 
alism and free-thinking; a confusion which 
proves useful for polemical purposes when he 
comes to relate the conflict between the Alex- 
andrine Syncretists and the early Christians, 

22 These two articles are specially interesting in that 
they serve to expound Diderot's own philosophy in an 
indirect manner. Naigeon wondered whence Diderot had 
taken his material for the discourse in which Epicurus 
is supposed to develop his system (CEuv., XIV, 527, n.) ; 
it comes from Brucker, vol. I, pp. 1255-1315, and hints 
on modern Epicurianism are from vol. IV, pp. 503 ff. 



276 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Hypatia and Cyril. In the same manner, the 
philosophy of the Romans and the Etruscans, 
or that of the Theosophists, affords good start- 
ing-points for vigorous outbursts against super- 
stition. Here, as in a hundred other passages 
in his works, Diderot uses the borrowed matter f 
to make fresh developments from it, as a preacher 
starts from a text, or (to use a more appropriate 
simile) as a brilliant talker launches forth from 
a passing remark into an eloquent digression. 

In some questions connected with the history 
of philosophy, concerning which the prevailing 
orthodoxy did not allow of any latitude, Brucker, 
who we may assume was a sound Lutheran, was 
a safe refuge. The article " Jesus-Christ " would 
be exceedingly interesting to study as an illus- 
tration of the way in which the editor of the 
Encyclopedie managed, with his semi-orthodox 
German source of information, to comply with 
the duty imposed upon him to write in conform- 
ity with Catholic beliefs. In this case, Brucker's 
marginal titles, " Christiana religio philosophia 
sensu excellentiori," and " Jesus Christus utrum 
philosophus fuerit?" (vol. Ill, pp. 242-247) 
gave him the cue for the beginning of his arti- 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 277 

cle, which for exoteric readers is reassuringly 
orthodox. But presently, when Christ and the 
apostles are denied the title of philosophers by 
Brucker, with an abundance of quotations to 
that effect from the Fathers and other authori- 
ties, Diderot does not fail to convey his esoteric 
meaning to such as are prepared to receive it, 
by means of those same quotations. One cannot 
help wondering how Brucker would have appre- 
ciated the use thus made of his learning; 
probably not any better than Saunderson's 
friends had appreciated the liberties taken with 
the religious beliefs of Saunderson in the Letter 
on the Blind. 

On the two great English philosophers whose 
influence, with that of Bacon, was paramount in 
the Encyclopedic circle, Diderot again uses 
Brucker's History. For Hobbes ( article " Hobb- 
isme"), he rather closely follows the Historia 
Critica Philosophic (vol. V, 145-199), con- 
cluding however with a return to the discus- 
sion of Hobbes's character, which introduces a 
curious parallel between the English philos- 
opher and Bousseau. The whole article betrays 
an evident sympathy for Hobbes's materialism, 



278 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

veiled under an apparently scrupulous care in 
quoting his most startling propositions verbatim, 
and a strong feeling of repulsion for his moral 
and political theories. 

" Locke " is made the subject of a short article 
which is disappointing. A biography, abridged 
from Brueker, is followed by a brief review of 
three topics of Lockian philosophy with which 
eighteenth-century readers had grown familiar: 
the reduction of all the contents of the under- 
standing to sensation ; the theory of education ; 
and the admission that matter itself might be 
endowed with thought. On the first question, 
Diderot goes further than Locke; he chooses to 
ignore " reflection," the second source of "ideas" 
in Locke's Essay, and concludes that such of our 
ideas as have no equivalent in nature are vain 
and void of meaning. 23 Hence may have arisen 
that scheme of a philosophical dictionary which 

23 A passage in the Paradoxe sur le comedien (VIII, 
390) shows how deeply rooted the idea was in Diderot 
that whatever has its origin in the mind only has no 
existence: "But since (that model) is ideal, it does not 
exist: now, there is nothing in the understanding which 
has not been in sensation. ' ' ' ( That is true. " It is easy 
to perceive why Berkeley's immaterialism grated so on 
his sense. 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 279 

he later expounded in his Letters to Falconet 
(XVIII, 232), and which, had he been able to 
carry it out, he intended to offer as a monu- 
ment of gratitude to Catherine II. 24 Locke's 
pedagogic ideas give Diderot the opportunity 
of sketching a plan for an education along 
" natural " lines which in several respects makes 
the reader think of the yet unpublished Emile 
of Rousseau. The discussion by Diderot of 
Locke's suggestion, that matter might think if 
it was so ordained by God, tends to prove that 
it contains nothing alarming for any established 
creed. Then the article stops very abruptly, 
and we cannot help suspecting that Lebreton 
must have curtailed it: for how could Diderot 
have foregone such an occasion of giving at 
least a few hints of his favorite theories on life 
and matter? One reason for the reverence in 
which Locke was held by the whole French 
school of mechanistic psychologists in the 
eighteenth and early nineteenth century, from 
Condillac to Cabanis, is clearly given in the fol- 
lowing digression of Diderot concerning Locke's 

24 Locke seemed to call for such a work, in his Essay 
concerning Human Understanding, Book III, particu- 
larly Chapt. IX. 



280 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

studies in medicine : " To write about meta- 
physics belongs only to the man who has prac- 
tised medicine for a long time; he alone has 
seen the phenomena, the machine quiet or 
furious, weak or full of vigor, sound or shat- 
tered, delirious or well-regulated, successively 
imbecile, enlightened, torpid, noisy, dumb, le- 
thargic, acting, living, and dead." The whole 
gist of the Rapports du physique et du moral, 
and generally of physiological psychology, is in 
that passage. 

Concerning Leibnitz and Spinoza, which are 
less important in this study, let us note that 
Diderot combined other sources with Brucker, 
his most usual because most copious reference. 
He copied abundantly from Fontenelle's Eloge 
for the biography of Leibnitz, but his bibliog- 
raphy of references is taken from Brucker (vol. 
V, 3 36-33 7) as well as his abstract of Leib- 
nitzianism (vol. V, 398-446). For Spinoza, 
Brucker being very insufficient, he drew largely 
from Bayle, adding some objections of his 
own. 25 The article on Descartes is by D'Alem- 

25 John Morley, Diderot and the Encyclopaedists, I, pp. 
228-233. The articles « ' Philosophe * ' and « ' Philosophie, » ' 
amusingly criticized in the same work, pp. 224-227, 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 281 

bert. For Malebranche, Diderot once more laid 
Fontenelle's Eloges under contribution, for 
Brucker had himself used them in writing his 
book. 

A curious instance of the way in which Di- 
derot drew from foreign sources, particularly 
from English publications, even the informa- 
tion which he might as well have gathered from 
French books, is supplied by his article on the 
"Zend Avesta." The French Orientalist An- 
quetil du Perron, on his return from long travels 
and studies in India, where he had sojourned 
from 1755 to 1762, had read before the Acad- 
emy of Sciences in Paris (May 1762) an ac- 
count of his voyage and a review of the works 
attributed to Zoroaster, copies of which he had 
brought back to be deposited in the King of 
France's Library. This paper, translated into 
English, was inserted in the Annual Register 
which the Dodsleys had begun to issue in 1758 
(Ann. Beg., vol. V, 1762, Part II, pp. 101- 

exemplify the usual alliance, which sometimes turns into 
a conflict, between Diderot's propensity to speak his own 
minds and his habit of borrowing material on questions 
that may prove " dangerous. ' ' His abstract from Wolf 
on Philosophy does not seem to come from Brucker. 



282 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

127). Diderot retranslated this document from 
the English, only adding a more enthusiastic 
note to the praises given by the English re- 
viewer to Anquetil's devotion to science, and 
loyally acknowledging his debt to the Annual 
Register. This periodical, with its very miscel- 
laneous information, the natural curiosities and 
the practical ideas which it collected, must have 
been a favorite with Diderot. It is not improb- 
able that some years later it was not foreign to 
the composition of Diderot's Supplement to 
Bougainville's Voyage. 

On the whole, Diderot's indebtedness to for- 
eign works in the Encyclopedie seems to be 
much greater than is commonly supposed. If 
one takes up the volumes of his OEuvres com- 
pletes in which the late Assezat has collected his 
main encyclopedic articles, one will be sur- 
prised to notice how large a share they contain 
of borrowed material and mere translations. 26 

26 Only in the letter A of the Encyclopedie, ' ' Abiens, ' ' 
"Abstinence des Pythagoriciens, ' ' " Asiatiques, ' ' 
11 Azabe-Kaberi, ' ' "Azarecah," are from Brueker; 
1 1 Aeridophages, ' ' 1 1 Adultere, ' ' and other articles men- 
tioned above, are from Chambers; "Aius Locutius" 
from Zedler; etc. 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 283 

But there is nothing new or startling in this. 
It would be comparatively an easy task, and not 
so long as it appears, were it not beyond the 
purpose of this book, to trace similar borrow- 
ings from Diderot's originals to their predeces- 
sors, for instance from Brucker to Fontenelle, 
Bayle, etc., or from Chambers to the Diction- 
naire de Trevoux, which in its turn had copied 
Moreri's posthumous edition by Basnage, Har- 
ris's Lexicum, and other dictionaries. The 
torch of encyclopedic knowledge had passed 
from man to man and from country to country 
for many years before Diderot took it up, and 
there is no doubt that it was considered more or 
less as common property, except by malignant 
critics. What would modern readers think if 
part of the Grande Encyclopedic was translated 
without acknowledgment from the Encyclo- 
paedia Britannica, or if articles in the last 
Chambers's Encyclopaedia were copied word for 
word from the Dictionnaire Larousse? How- 
ever strange this practice of wholesale borrow- 
ing may appear to us to-day, it must have been 
natural in the early age of encyclopedia-writing. 
In the case of Diderot, several other reasons 



284 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

explain this conduct. He was, as we have 
already noted, inclined to borrow one, two, or 
more pages, when he thought them interesting, 
in order to weave them with his own disquisi- 
tions, with or without acknowledgment. On 
topics which were of little or no interest to him, 
like systematic philosophy, or questions which 
required an orthodox treatment, he willingly 
relied on someone else's authority. Lastly, the 
great haste and the secrecy with which the main 
part of the Encyclopedic had to be written, 
especially after the desertion of D'Alembert and 
of many contributors, the urgent necessity of 
completing in a short time a work for which the 
subscribers had paid in advance, and in which 
the fortunes of several booksellers were involved, 
compelled him to finish almost alone a task 
which to-day requires the work of hundreds of 
scholars and scientists. Then, in the last ten 
volumes which came out all together in 1765, 
Diderot discovered that Lebreton had cut out 
the boldest parts of many articles, and it is a 
safe surmise that these parts were in the major- 
ity of cases Diderot's original share in the 
articles. It is indeed unfortunate for him that 



THE ENCYCLOPEDIST 285 

what is generally known as his contribution to 
the Encyclopedie, whether in the original text 
or in later reprints, is the least personal part of 
his encyclopedic work. 

His original work, on which he looked with 
some degree of pride, in that vast compilation 
which as a whole appeared to him a very un- 
satisfactory book, is of a twofold nature. It 
consists of the philosophic propaganda, "de- 
signed to change the general manner of think- 
ing," and the description of the trades. The 
reforming spirit, characteristic both of the age 
and the writer, brought about persecutions, but 
ensured a European popularity and a far- 
reaching influence to the Encyclopedie; it 
placed it in a class apart from all other dic- 
tionaries and encyclopedias, except Bayle's 
Dictionary. The department of practical knowl- 
edge, the popularization of the secrets of the 
arts, sciences, and trades, is more in conformity 
with the modern conception of encyclopedias, 
and it may be said to be altogether Diderot's 
own, for he was the first to make technical infor- 
mation rank higher in importance than mere 
erudition. Thus the practical part of his work, 



286 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

though obsolete in matter to-day, is altogether 
modern in its conception; and the polemical 
part, which has no equivalent in later encyclo- 
pedias, will remain representative of the pro- 
gressive intelligence of an enlightened age. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE DRAMATIST 

Towards the end of his life, after he had 
seen the last volume of Supplements and the last 
volume of Plates of the Encyclopedic through 
the press, Diderot made a melancholy reflec- 
tion, in the course of his Refutation du livre 
d'Helvetius intitule 1/ Homme (1773-1774) : 
" Chance, and even more the necessities of life, 
dispose of us as they please; who knows this 
better than I do ? This is the reason why, for 
some thirty years, I have against my taste made 
the Encyclopedie, and written only two plays " 
(II, 312). 

He elsewhere remembers the needy years of 
his youth, when he managed to go to the theatre 
regularly (VII, 401), and when we may pre- 
sume that, like his friend Eousseau about the 
same time, he dreamt of forcing open the gates 
of fame by the short and uneasy way of dra- 
matic triumphs. While translating Temple 
Stanyan and Robert James for money, he must 
287 



288 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

have begun to sketch plays. He had even 
thought of becoming an actor, and he tells us 
that for a time he had trained himself for that 
profession, reciting passages from Corneille and 
Moliere along the lonely walks of the Jardin du 
Luxembourg, even on the coldest days (VIII, 
398). But it was not possible for Diderot to 
become interested in anything without first sub- 
jecting it to criticism and framing it all anew 
to his satisfaction. Thus an account of Diderot 
as a dramatist must deal more with theory than 
practice, with suggestions than achievements. 

No other part of Diderot's writings has given 
rise to a larger mass of studies and criticisms 
than his plays and his essays concerning dra- 
matic literature. The great interest which they 
have excited in European literature is due to 
two main facts: the novelty of their embodi- 
ment in one doctrine or system, which was sin- 
gularly in advance of the eighteenth-century 
French dramaturgy; and the relation which 
they bear to the theory and practice of the stage 
in England, before Diderot, and in Germany, 
after him. We shall of course be concerned not 
so much with the echoes which Diderot's ideas 



THE DEAMATIST 289 

found abroad, particularly beyond the Khine, 
as with the inspirations and examples which he 
received from the other side of the Channel. 

In the Bijoux Indiscrets (Chap. 38, "En- 
tretien sur les lettres"), Diderot had, some- 
what after the manner of Dryden in his Essay 
on Dramatic Poetry (1668), discussed in dia- 
logue form three great topics of criticism: the 
comparative merits of the ancient and the mod- 
ern writers; nature and the rules; the conven- 
tions of dramatic writing and acting. The first 
of these questions was already rather worn out in 
Diderot's age ; so he quickly dismissed it, satis- 
fied with a free imitation of Swift's Battle of 
the Boohs (Chap. 39, "Keve de Mirzoza") and 
a fling at the race of critics (p. 296). The other 
two topics, namely, the everlasting question of 
nature and art, and the deficiencies of the French 
classical stage, were going to exercise Diderot's 
critical faculty for many years. Starting from 
the old principle that only the true can please 
and move, and from the mistaken notion that 
the perfection of a play consists in imitating an 
action with such accuracy that the spectator is 
deceived throughout and fancies that he wit- 
nesses the action itself, Diderot blamed the com- 
20 



290 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

plication and rush of French tragedies, the rant 
or wit of their dialogues, the artificial nature of 
their denouements. 

"And then," Diderot added, "did anyone 
ever talk as we recite ? Do princes and kings 
walk otherwise than a man who walks well? 
Have they ever gesticulated as though they 
were possessed or raving mad? Do princesses 
utter sharp hisses while they talk ? 1 People say 
that we have carried tragedy to a high degree 
of perfection ; and I consider it a demonstrated 
fact that, of all genres of literature to which 
(the French) have applied themselves in the last 
centuries, this is the most imperfect " (IV, 
283-286). 

In the Letter on the Deaf and Dumb (1751), 
Diderot tells us of an experiment which he used 
to make in order to ascertain how far the play- 
ers acted in conformity with the parts they 
held : as he knew the words of the plays hy heart, 
he would stop his ears with his fingers, watch 
the gestures of the performers, and only listen 
when he was misled and confused by their 
action. "Ah! Sir," he concludes, "how few 

1 See Moliere's satirical description of the fashionable 
way of playing French tragedy, as practised at a rival 
theatre, the Hotel de Bourgogne, in Impromptu de Ver- 
sailles, sc. 1. 



THE DEAMATIST 291 

players were able to stand such a trial ! " (I, 
359). Of the player's art he would have said 
what the ancient orator said of the art of elo- 
quence, that the quality most to be prized in 
public speaking was action; the next, action; 
and the next, action. 

Action, Diderot thought, was in some cases 
superior to the highest reaches of eloquence or 
poetry. 

" There are some sublime gestures which all 
the resources of oratory shall never express. 
Such is the gesture of Lady Macbeth in Shakes- 
peare's tragedy. Walking in her sleep, she 
comes forward in silence (Act V, sc. 1) on 
the stage, her eyes closed, imitating the action 
of a person who washes her hands, as if hers 
were still stained with the blood of her king, 
whom she had murdered twenty years before. 
I know of nothing in discourse more pathetic 
than the silence of that woman and the motion 
of her hands. What a picture of remorse ! " 
(I, 254-255). 

To Voltaire, who, as Gibbon tells us, adhered 
to the artificial mannerisms of performance 
which were the tradition of the French stage, 
Diderot wrote, Nov. 28, 1760, after the presen- 
tation of Tancrede: 



292 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

" Ah ! my dear master, if you could see Clairon 
passing across the stage, half fainting in the 
arms of the executioners who surround her, her 
knees bending under her, her eyes closed, her 
arms falling stiff by her side, as though she was 
dead ; if you heard the cry that she utters when 
she perceives Tancrede, you would remain more 
convinced than ever that silence and pantomime 
sometimes have a pathos to which all the re- 
sources of oratory can never attain" (XIX, 
457). 

This early taste of Diderot for theorizing 
about the dramatic art, that is, the art of the 
actor as well as that of the playwright, might 
have produced nothing but treatises and plans 
of reforms. Yet it was not likely that he would 
refrain from trying his personal skill in writ- 
ing, if not in performing, plays, while thus find- 
ing fault with the traditional repertoire and art 
of acting. It is not very easy to determine 
exactly when he began to write plays. Eosen- 
kranz finds no evidence that Diderot wrote for 
the stage before 1757, but endeavors to ascribe 
to him a drama entitled L'Humanite, triste 
drame, par un aveugle tartar e? possibly written 

3 Karl Rosenkranz, Diderot's Leben und WerTce, Leip- 
zig, 1866, vol. I, p. 268; he developed this point in 



THE DBAMATIST 293 

in 1749, but first published in an unauthorized 
edition of Diderot's works in 1773. This is not 
at all probable. Diderot's first dramatic attempt 
was Le Fils Naturel, but he was several years 
writing it, probably because the Encyclopedic 
left him but very little time for this kind of 
work. In an unpublished letter of Diderot to 
an obscure fellow-playwright, Antoine Bret, we 
have a proof that as early as 1753, and probably 
for a year or two before that, Diderot had been 
engaged in writing at least two plays; the one 
which he discusses with Bret seems to be Le 
Fils Naturelj which has an incident in common 
with one of Bret's plays, Le Jaloux, that was 
never performed. 3 Diderot probably also wrote 
at a comparatively early date some of the dra- 
matic sketches now included in his works, and 
never had time or the inclination to develop 
them into plays. For instance his sketch en- 
titled Le Sherif, the plot of which is similar to 
that of Measure for Measure, yet without any 
trace of a Shakespearean influence, is said by 

Gosche's Jahrbuch der Literaturgeschichte, vol. I. See 
Assezat 's discussion of the same point in CEuv., VII, 5 ff. 
8 This letter will be found at the end of the present 
work, Appendix I. 



294 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Grimm (Dec. 1, 1769) to have been contem- 
plated more than twelve years earlier, that is 
to say before 1757. 

It was only in 1757, however, that Diderot 
published Le Fils Naturel ou les epreuves de la 
vertu, a comedy written in prose, in five acts; 
it was performed without success in 1771. To 
this play were appended some dialogues con- 
cerning dramatic theory, entitled Entretiens sur 
Le Fils Naturel: Dorval et moi. In 1758 he 
published Le Fere de famille, also a prose com- 
edy in iive acts, with a Discours sur la poesie 
dramatique; the play met with considerable suc- 
cess when it was acted in 1761 and 1769. 

"Diderot's theatre," it has been rightly 
said, 4 "is now for us nothing but a commen- 
tary on his theories." As a matter of fact, his 
theories were partly intended as a commentary 
and defence of his plays. His unlucky efforts 
in play-writing have been very severely dealt 
with by critics, more particularly by French 
critics ; and indeed it is difficult to vindicate his 

* J. Texte, Introduction to Extraits de Diderot, Paris, 
4th edition, 1909, p. lv. 



THE DRAMATIST 295 

performances. But it would be unjust to deny 
that in dramatic theory he showed originality. 5 
Between 1750 and 1758, from two independent 
movements which tended, in France and in 
England, to substitute a new dramatic genre for 
the classical tragedy and comedy of the French 
seventeenth century, he succeeded in organizing 
for the first time into one dramatic system ele- 
ments which before him had been more or less 
scattered and disconnected. It is true that he 
was naturally inclined to consider as great nov- 
elties, nay, as his own discoveries, ideas which 
had already been expressed by someone else; 
but was it not because he had, according to his 
custom, harbored those ideas long enough in his 
mind to make them fructify, and discovered 
some latent wealth or new values in them which 
their originators themselves had failed to per- 
ceive? There was no need for him to give to 
any of his predecessors the credit of the philo- 
sophic generalizations which he had been the 

6 This negative view is to be found in F. Brunetiere, 
Evolution des genres, Paris, 1892 (2d edition), vol. I, 
pp. 152 ff.; also in Ernest Bernbaum, in an unpublished 
thesis, Harvard University, on Sentimental and Domestic 
Drama in England and France, 1906. 



296 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

first to make. Yet, while lie claimed that he 
was about to renovate all dramatic literature, 
he was more eager than even his critics have 
been to point to precedents and confirmations of 
his theories in the theatre of the French, the 
English, and even the ancients. 

In or about the year 1753, as he tells us, 6 
Diderot, then forty years old, endeavored to 
frame for himself some philosophic notions 
concerning what we call the true, the good, and 
the beautiful. We have already seen how some 
years before he had begun to shape a system of 
positive ethics under the influence of Shaftes- 
bury, and to define, after Francis Bacon, the 
method by which scientific truth could be dis- 
covered. In both cases he had been emboldened, 
by English precedents as well as by the natural 
bent of his analytic mind, to criticize and reject 
the traditional elements preserved in religion 
and in metaphysical systems. Concerning the 
beautiful, we shall see in a subsequent chapter 7 

e VII, 390, the monologue of Ariste the philosopher 
(that is, Diderot) on the fundamental nature of our 
ideas of the true, the good, the beautiful, nature, taste, 
etc. 

'Chapter VIII, The Critic. 



THE DRAMATIST 297 

what results he attained in his philosophic in- 
quiry and to what extent those results affected 
his criticism of art and literature. In the par- 
ticular theory of dramatic literature, which had 
early interested him, he proceeded in the same 
positive spirit as in ethics and in science: he 
found tradition insufficient, narrow, and arti- 
ficial ; he called for truth, nature, and morality, 
saw the possibility of a complete transforma- 
tion of the stage, and looked for confirmations 
of his ideas in the examples of some independent 
playwrights at home and abroad. This connec- 
tion between the dramatic theories and the 
general philosophic message of Diderot should 
be borne in mind, because it accounts for and 
justifies his belief in the originality of his 
system. 

Considered in this light, his dramatic system 
is primarily a reaction against tradition, and a 
philosophic attempt to forecast the future of 
dramatic literature, to outline the probable path 
of its development, at a time when the classical 
edifice of conventional rules appeared to be 
tottering to its fall. The substitution of a new 
dramatic ideal for the old naturally carried as 



298 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

its corollary a reformation of the art of acting. 
!Now, what was Diderot's relation to the general 
movement which had already begun in France 
and England towards the creation of a more 
"natural/' that is more realistic, kind of dra- 
matic literature than that of the classical age 
of France? What British dramatists did he 
extol as good models and worthy guides ? And 
to what extent was he influenced by his friend 
Garrick in his philosophy of the art of acting? 
The reaction against the classical or pseudo- 
classical tradition, in the history of which Di- 
derot was to occupy a prominent place, may be 
said to have had two distinct aspects before he 
came, in France and in England. In France, 
the growth of sentiment, la sensibilite, had 
affected the general character of comedy, caus- 
ing it to become less satirical than it had been 
with Moliere and Eegnard, and to deal more 
with emotion and sentiment, with Destouches, 
Marivaux, and La Chaussee, until it received 
the paradoxical name of "tearful comedy," la 
comedie larmoyante. 8 In England, meanwhile, 

8 See M. G. Lanson *s Nivelle de la Chaussee et la 
comedie larmoyante, Paris, 1887 (2d edition, 1903). If 
in what follows we seem to claim for Diderot some of 



THE DRAMATIST 299 

the increasing importance of the middle-class in 
the affairs of the nation and the consequent 
tendency of literature to become more democratic 
operated in conjunction with certain literary 
movements, like the reaction against the influ- 
ence of French classicism, the moralization of 
the stage, and the return to Elizabethan models, 
to produce a sort of tragedy of the middle-class, 
la tragedie bourgeoise. A common feature of 
both the French and the English movement, as 
of most new departures in literary history, was 
a wish to "return to nature," or rather to 
"return to truth," truth being understood as a 
close imitation of the reality that is nearest the 
audience. Were not mild emotions nearer 
reality, in an age of sentiment, than a satirical 
spirit castigating vice through ridicule? And 
were not the misfortunes of common people, in 
a democratic age, nearer the truth of life than 
the catastrophes which had befallen heroes and 
kings in mythology or history? 

The common element which is to be found in 

the credit which M. Lanson gives to La ChaussSe as a 
dramatic reformer, it is because Diderot summed up iu 
his system what had been done before him abroad as well 
as in Prance, and exerted a wider influence. 



i 



300 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

the evolution of the French and the English 
stage during the early part of the eighteenth 
century, the analogy which the two movements 
bore to each other by their common tendency to 
depart from a certain dramatic tradition in 
order to give a more faithful representation of 
human actions, is obvious and was very early 
perceived. It may have obscured the essen- 
tial difference which separated the French and 
the English effort to disintegrate the neoclass- 
ical tradition : the French dramatists made in- 
novations in comedy only, for Voltaire had as 
it were monopolized the tragic stage, and would 
not hear of a " tragedie bourgeoise " ; the Eng- 
lish, by a return to the Elizabethan tradition, 
produced examples of this middle-class tragedy 
which in the latter part of the century gave 
rise to the Drama. Two other considerations 
have contributed to introduce some confusion 
into this question : in the first place, the protest 
against the so-called Aristotelian rule 9 which 
admitted of no common or mean characters and 
actions on the tragic stage had early been voiced 
in France by no less a playwright than Cor- 
9 Aristotle, Poetics, Chap. XIII. 



THE DEAMATIST 301 

neille; 10 and, in the second place, the English 
stage, in the first two decades of the century, 
had produced some moral comedies, which had 
to some extent influenced the plays of Des- 

10 Corneille, Bon Sanche d'Aragon, Epitre dedicatoire 
a Monsieur do Zuylichem, had given in substance what 
Lillo, Diderot, and Beaumarehais later proclaimed : ' ' Je 
dirai plus . . .: la tragedie doit exciter de la pitie et de 
la crainte, et cela est de ses parties essentielles, puisqu'il 
entre dans sa definition. Or, s'il est vrai que ce dernier 
sentiment ne s 'excite en nous par sa representation que 
quand nous voyons souffrir nos semblables, et que leurs 
inf ortunes nous en font apprehender de pareilles, n 'est-il 
pas vrai aussi qu'il y pourrait etre excite plus fortement 
par la vue des malheurs arrives aux personnes de notre 
condition, a qui nous ressemblons tout a fait, que par 
1 'image de ceux qui font trebucher de leurs trones les 
plus grands monarques, avec qui nous n'avons aucun 
rapport qu'en tant que nous sommes susceptibles des 
passions qui les out jetes dans ce precipice; ce qui ne se 
rencontre pas toujours?" . . . "Et certes, apres avoir 
lu dans Aristote que la tragedie est une imitation des 
actions, et non pas des personnages, je pense avoir 
quelque droit . . . de prendre pour maxime que c'est 
par la seule consideration des actions, sans aucun egard 
aux personnages, qu'on doit determiner de quelle espece 
est un poeme dramatique. ; ' 

To be sure, even though Corneille does not think of 
"bourgeois" here, his thesis seems rather novel and 
paradoxical to himself, and he adds: "Si vous ne me 
pouvez accorder la gloire d'avoir assez appuye une nou- 
veaute, vous me laisserez du moins celle d'avoir passable- 
ment d^fendu un paradoxe." 



302 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

touches; 11 so that it has seemed allowable to | 
trace the origin of the " tragedie bourgeoise " in j 
French literature, and the first beginnings of ' 
sentimental comedy in English literature. But 
it remains true that neither Corneille nor any 
French dramatist after him had dared to intro- 
duce mere "bourgeois" as protagonists in a 
tragedy, and that, on the other hand, although 
the moral tone of English comedy had been 
raised by Colley Cibber and Steele under the 
influence of Jeremy Collier's pamphlet and of 
the general sense of propriety which began to 
prevail in the age of Addison, the aim of the 
English reformers had never been to replace 
the comic by the pathetic emotions, that is, pro- 
fessedly to write sentimental comedy. 

Thus, when Diderot began to write for the 
stage, the traditional separation des genres, the 
distinction rigidly kept by the Erench classicists 
between the comic and the tragic, was very 
seriously threatened in France by the admix- 
ture of sentimental and moral elements in 
comedy. Not that the "monstrous" Shake- 

11 E. Bernbaum, op. cit., has attempted to prove that 
Destouches is the originator of sentimental comedy in 
France. 



THE DRAMATIST 303 

spearean alliance of laughter and tears, of 
clowns and kings, had had any influence as yet : 
Voltaire had condemned it, it was abhorrent to 
all polished taste in England as well as in 
France, and the Romantic theory concerning 
the reflected beauties of "the sublime and the 
grotesque" was still far from all minds. But 
comedy was no longer essentially comic; and, 
for those who, like Diderot, looked to England 
for novelties of every kind, tragedy ceased to 
appear necessarily confined to kings, legendary 
heroes, saints, or historical characters. Some 
English writers, feeling more at ease than Cor- 
neille in forsaking the "tragoedia cothurnata, 
fitting kings," because they lacked no precedents 
in the dramatic tradition of their country, had 
taken tragic plots from real life, and characters 
from among "people of our own condition." 
Otway's Orphan (1680) was a sort of domestic 
tragedy said to be related to a fact; Rowe's 
Fair Penitent (1703) had staged "a melan- 
choly tale of private woes" which owed some- 
thing to The Fatal Dowry of Massinger and 
Field; and Southerne's Fatal Marriage or the 
Innocent Adultery (1694) had treated the 



304 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

ancient theme which Tennyson later resumed in 
Enoch Arden. 12 These in turn served as prece- 
dents to the two English dramatists who, in 
Diderot's lifetime, again dared to invade the 
tragic stage with "moral tales from private 
life"; but Diderot gave them all the credit of 
the bold innovation, and established the belief 
that the originators of domestic tragedy were 
George Lillo, in The London Merchant, and 
Edward Moore, in The Gamester. 

The play of George Lillo entitled The Lon- 
don Merchant, or The History of George Barn- 
well, derived from a real story preserved in a 
popular ballad, had been performed with great 
success in London in 1731. Translated into 
French by Pierre Clement in 1748, it had a 
second edition in Paris in 1751, and in 1755 
was incorporated in the Theatre bourgeois. 
From the Dedication of The London Merchant, 
it appears that Lillo was conscious of the com- 
parative novelty of his attempt in England: 

" Tragedy," he wrote, " is so far from losing 

its dignity, by being accommodated to the cir- 

12 See A. H. Thorndike, Tragedy, 1908, pp. 271, 274, 

285; and pp. 316-319 for what concerns Lillo and Moore. 



THE DEAMATIST 305 

cumstances of the generality of mankind, that 
it is more truly august in proportion to the 
extent of its influence, and the numbers that 
are properly affected by it. As it is more truly 
great to be the instrument of good to many, who 
stand in need of our assistance, than to a very 
small part of that number. 

"If princes, etc., were alone liable to mis- 
fortunes, arising from vice, or weaknesses in 
themselves or others, there would be good reason 
for confining the characters in tragedy to those 
of superior rank; but, since the contrary is 
evident, nothing can be more reasonable than to 
proportion the remedy to the disease." 13 

If the traditional kind of tragedy has proved 
effectual in fulfilling that moral function which 
for Lillo is the main utility of dramatic per- 
formances, why should we hesitate to make its 
field wider? 

"I have attempted, indeed, to enlarge the 
province of the graver kind of poetry, and should 
be glad to see it carried on by some abler hand. 
Plays founded on moral tales in private life 
may be of admirable use, by carrying convic- 
tion to the mind with such irresistible force as 
to engage all the faculties and powers of the soul 

13 We quote from A. W. Ward's excellent edition of 
Lillo 's London Merchant and Fatal Curiosity, Belles- 
Lettrea Series, 1906. 
21 



306 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

in the cause of virtue, by stifling vice in its first 
principles." 

With this laudable end in view, Lillo was the 
first dramatist who made " a London 'Prentice " 
his hero since the distant time when Heywood 
had turned four apprentices into heroes of 
chivalry and been ridiculed for it in Beaumont 
and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle 
(1611) ; but he knew that he had been preceded 
in the field of domestic tragedy by more recent 
playwrights, and he mentioned them in the 
Prologue to The London Merchant, which gives 
in abstract both the manifesto and the history 
of the tragedie bourgeoise: 

" The Tragick Muse, sublime, delights to show 
Princes distrest and scenes of royal woe; 
In awful pomp, majestick, to relate 
The fall of nations or some heroe's fate; 
That scepter'd chiefs may by example know 
The strange vicissitude of things below : 
What dangers on security attend; 
How pride and cruelty in ruin end; 
Hence Providence supream to know, and own 
Humanity adds glory to a throne. 

In ev'ry former age and foreign tongue 
With native grandure thus the Goddess sung. 
Upon our stage indeed, with wish'd success, 
You've sometimes seen her in a humbler dress — 
Great only in distress. When she complains 
In Southern's, Rowe's or Otwaxfs moving strains, 



THE DEAMATIST 307 

The brilliant drops that fall from each bright eye 
The absent pomp with brighter gems supply. 
Forgive us then, if we attempt to show, 
In artless strains, a tale of private woe." Etc. 1 * 

The venerable belief that art is subservient to 
morality, that poetic ornaments serve as a sweet 
coating for the bitter pill of the moral lesson, or 
as honey on the edge of the cup filled with a 
wholesome but unpalatable draught, had never 
been expressed with a stronger conviction than 
it is in the Dedication and the Prologue of The 
London Merchant, not even by that other " Lon- 
don merchant," Samuel Richardson. This 
seems to have impressed Diderot greatly. 
Already imbued through Shaftesbury with the 
idea of a close relationship between the good 
and the beautiful, confirmed in the notion that 
art should develop the principles of virtue by 
his worship for the virtuous Richardson, he was 
quite ready to initiate another worship (the 
natural form of his admiration) for George 
Lillo. In his treatise On Dramatic Poetry, 1 * 
we find him indiscriminately mingling in his 
praise Corneille's Cinna, Racine's Phedre, the 
episode of Clementina in Grandison, and scenes 

14 The London Merchant, A. W. Ward edition, pp. 8-9. 
16 Section xvii, Du Ton; (Euv., VII, 365. 



308 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

from The London Merchant, for their excellence 
in the subtle connections of the dialogue with 
the psychology of the characters. Take the 
farewell scene between Barnwell and his friend, 
he exclaims: 

Barnwell. — So far was I lost to goodness, 
so devoted to the author of my ruin, that, had 
she insisted on my murdering thee, I think I 
shou'd have done it. 

" Trueman. — Prithee, aggravate thy faults 
no more! 

Barn. — I think I shou'd ! Thus, good and 
generous as you are, I shou'd have murder 'd 
you! 

"'True. — We have not yet embrac'd, and 
may be interrupted. Come to my arms ! ?16 

" We have not yet embraced : what a reply to, 
I should have murdered you ! If I had a son 
who felt no connection here, I should prefer him 
never to have been born. Yes, I should feel a 
greater aversion towards him than towards 
Barnwell, the murderer of his uncle." 

Elsewhere, in a review of a poem entitled 
Lettre de Barnevelt dans sa prison (1764) by 
Dorat, Diderot praised Lillo at the expense of 
his imitator, and, returning once more to the 
wonderful "Let us embrace," he said whim- 

16 The London Merchant, Aet I, sc. 5 (A. W. Ward, 
p. 98). Diderot 'a rendering of this passage is free. 



THE DRAMATIST 309 

sically: "I advise the man whose heart is not 
torn by these words to go and be thrown again 
by Deucalion and Pyrrha over their shoulders; 
for he has remained a stone " (VIII, 449). 

He charged his contemporaries to share his 
unbounded admiration : " Confess that The Lon- 
don Merchant is a sublime thing ! " To those 
who timidly objected " decency, propriety/' he 
retorted by comparing the English drama with 
Greek tragedy, the despair of Millwood and 
Barnwell's tears of repentance with the frantic 
outcries of Philoctetes in Sophocles (VII, 95). 

His zealous propaganda bore some fruit. 
Dorat's epistle has just been mentioned; An- 
seaume in 1765 wrote a comic opera entitled 
L'Ecole de la jeunesse ou le Barnevelt frangais, 
— this Dutch name seemed more harmonious 
to French ears than "Barnwell"; Sebastien 
Mercier in 1769 gave Jenneval ou le Barnevelt 
frangais; and in 1778 La Harpe printed a 
Barnevelt in the first volume of his Theatre, 
which was Lillo's play attenuated and revised 
according to the canons of classical taste. 17 

17 On these imitations, see F. Gaiffe, Le Drame en 
France an XVIIIe siecle, Paris, 1910, pp. 73-74. 



310 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

The other English pla y in which Diderot 
found a germ of the " new poetics " that he was 
seeking, Edward Moore's Gamester, was more 
recent than The London Merchant: it had been 
performed at Drury Lane in 1753, and pub- 
lished in the same year. Diderot, in his Con- 
versations with Dorval (1757), gave it as an 
excellent example of domestic tragedy; having 
no doubt praised it enthusiastically in conver- 
sation, he was urged by his friends to translate 
it and submit it to the Comedie Frangaise for 
performance. 18 His translation, written in 
1760, was neither played nor printed in his life- 
time; it was published for the first time in 1819. 
But The Gamester was soon offered to the 
French public in another translation, by the 
Abbe Brute de Loirelle (1762), and in a poor 
imitation by Saurin, entitled Beverley (1768), 
which was successful on the stage. Even the 
mathematician D'Alembert was interested in 
this English drama, and translated the soliloquy 
of Beverley in his prison, of course with the 

is « They all want me to translate The Gamester, and 
give it to the Theatre Francais. > > (To Mile Volland, 
Sept. 5, 1760; (Euv., XVIII, 448, 451, 461.) Le Joueur, 
drame, will be found in (Euv., VII, 417-525. 



THE DRAMATIST 311 

alterations which French "taste" called for. 19 
A short comparison between the original 
Gamester and Diderot's Le Joueur is instruct- 
ive, and to some extent entertaining. Le Joueur 
is a free translation, sometimes a mere para- 
phrase, especially in the passages which express 
violent emotions: here Diderot, who as a rule 
preserves the general tone of his original rather 
faithfully, almost always emphasizes the ex- 
clamations, lamentations, apostrophes to Heaven, 
les cris, as he would have said, which marked 
the more pathetic situations. 20 The philosopher 
and the man of sentiment also appears at times, 
to develop what Moore's rhythmic prose had 
briefly expressed; so that it becomes difficult for 
the reader to discern what may have been written 
by the author of The Gamester and what by the 
author of Le Fere de famille: 

" Madame Beverley [who had just unmasked 
her husband's wicked friend Stukely]. — And 
there is a Heaven ! a God ! an avenger of crime ! 
a place destined for the wicked ! and the earth 

"Assezat, in Diderot >s (Em., VII, 413-415. 

20 See for instance the scene of Beverley's arrest 
(Joueur, Acte V, sc. 1, p. 503; — Gamester, 1753 edition, 
p. 67). Diderot preserved the exact order of the dialogue, 
but divided the acts into scenes after the French fashion. 



312 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

does not gape open ! O God ! Thou wishest him 
to be abandoned to his own heart; I consent: 
Thou allowest him time; Thou wishest, before 
consummating his loss through hard-heartedness, 
to let him appease Thy wrath by his repentance. 
I subscribe to Thy will." [Re-enter Lucy.'] 

"Lucy, follow me. Come, child, come and 
hear the wretchedness of thy poor mistress, and 
mingle thy tears with hers. Come; yet know, 
and do not forget, that good and evil come from 
above; that God has not turned His face away 
even from him who suffers undeservedly, that 
He sometimes strikes with most violence the one 
whom He most loves ; and that whether He gives 
affliction or prosperity, He always gives re- 
wards." 21 

In this tirade, which to English ears would 
have had the familiar sound of a sermon, Di- 
derot unconsciously violated that "propriety" 

21 Thus Diderot (VII, 481), while the original is much 
simpler (Gamester, 1753, p. 50): "Mrs Bev. — Why 
opens not the Earth to swallow such a Monster? Be 
Conscience then his Punisher, 'till Heaven in mercy 
gives him Penitence, or dooms him in his Justice. [Re- 
enter Lucy.] Come to my Chamber, Lucy; I have a 
Tale to tell thee, shall make thee weep for thy poor 
Mistress. 

Yet Heav'n the guiltless Sufferer regards, 
And when it most afflicts, it most rewards. 

[Exeunt.]" 



THE DRAMATIST 313 

commonly observed on the British stage which 
excludes references to God by name. On the 
other hand, the French literary " bienseances " 
were respected. This sentence of Moore's, for 
instance, referring to Beverley in his prison: 
" The bleak Winds perhaps blowing upon his 
pillow ! " was deemed intolerable, untranslatable, 
and was duly replaced by a consecrated cliche: 
"De la paille est son lit, une pierre est son 
chevet." 22 

Some parts of Diderot's translation reveal a 
good deal of haste and carelessness, and, one 
might add, an insufficient knowledge of every- 
day English. We have seen that, in spite of 
his reputation for English scholarship, he was 
more likely to be versed in the language of 
books than in that of conversation and corre- 
spondence. Thus in this translation it some- 
times happened that he missed the meaning of 
a whole sentence and became inextricably in- 
volved for having too hastily assumed that one 
important word in the sentence was familiar 
to him. 23 

22 Gamester, p. 69; Joueur, Acte V, sc. 2 (VII, 505). 

23 See above, Chapter V, p. 268. The two following 
examples frmri Le Joueur will justify the reservations 






314 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 



111 spite of his admiration for The Gamester, \ 
Diderot conceived that its general effect might 
be improved by some additions to, or compli- 
cations of the plot. We are not certain that he 
suggested to Saurin the awful "tableau" in 
which the gamester raises a knife over his sleep- 
ing children, a dramatic contrivance which 
contributed a great deal to the success of 
Beverley in Paris. But we know through 

which we have made concerning Diderot's knowledge of 
English.— Gamester, p. 10: "Charlotte. — Cure her, and 
be a friend then. — Stukely. How cure her, Madam? — 
Char. Eeclaim my Brother. — Stu. Ay; give him a new 
Creation ; or breathe another Soul into him. I '11 think 
on't, Madam. Advice I see is thankless. " Le Joueur, 
I, sc. 5: "Char. Si vous etes de ses amis, Monsieur, 
faites-le voir. — Stu. Comment, madame? — Char. En 
ramenant mon frere de son egarement et en le rendant a 
sa malheureuse epouse. — Stu. J'entends, il faut que je 
refonde mon ami, ame et corps. , Ce n/'est que cela que 
vous exigez? J'y penserai, madame. Mais en atten- 
dant, vous me permettrez de vous dire que je ne vols pas, 
dans le conseil que vous avez la oonte de me donner, de 
quoi vous remercier et vous etre oblige." 

Again, in Gamester, p. 53, the confusion of the un- 
familiar word "wainscot" with " waistcoat, ' ' and an 
imperfect understanding of the verb "to sit down," 
produce an absurd result in Le Joueur, IV, sc. 3 : " Stu. 
Tell me of Beverly— Row bore he his last Shock? — 
Bates. Like one (so Dawson says) whose Senses have 
been numb'd with Misery. When all was lost, he fixt 



THE DRAMATIST 315 

Grimm that Stukely's passion for Mrs Beverley, 
in Saurin's play, was of Diderot's own inven- 
tion, — an improvement similar to his suggestion 
of an encounter between Miss Howe and Love- 
lace in Clarissa. 24 

On the whole, however, his appreciation of 
The London Merchant and The Gamester was 
deep, whole-hearted, and unfeigned. He nowhere 
expressed any criticism against those plays ; and 
whatever corrections he ventured to make were 
only intended to facilitate their success in a 
land where taste, according to him, was still 

his Eyes upon the Ground, and stood some Time, with 
folded Arms, stupid and motionless. Then snatching 
his Sword, that hung against the Wainscot, he sat him 
down; and with a Look of fixt Attention, drew Figures 
on the Floor. . . ." Translation: " Stu. Mais ou est 
Beverly? . . . ou est-il? . . . Et sa derniere catastrophe, 
comment Pa-t-il soutenue? — Bates. Dauson m'a dit, 
comme un homme abasourdi. Lorsqu'il eut tout perdu, 
ses yeux s 'attachment a la terre. II demeura quelque 
temps ainsi, les bras croises sur la poitrine, immobile, 
stupide. Puis tirant son epee, qui 6tait accrochee a une 
des boutonnieres de sa veste, il se eoucha par terre; et 
les regards distraits, egares, il se mit a tracer des figures 
avec la pointe. ' ' It seems difficult to ascribe this 
blunder to mere carelessness, especially in such an im- 
portant instance of described ' ' pantomine. ' ' 
24 See next chapter, p. 342. 



316 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

absurdly narrow. He wanted to broaden the 
esthetic notions of art, nature, taste, just as in 
metaphysics he had called for a broader concep- 
tion of God : " Elargissez Dieu ! " Make art 
more comprehensive, more tolerant, more uni- 
versal; do not exclude as vulgar, cheap, con- 
temptible, emotions to which a large number of 
our fellow-men are responsive. Let the stage 
no longer be aristocratic, but popular, so that 
its appeal may be wider. This, as it seemed to 
him, in his ignorance of the Elizabethan tradi- 
tion, was what Lillo and Moore, with true Eng- 
lish "boldness," had done for the first time since 
the age of Sophocles. 

Boldness, a radical spirit of reform, a thor- 
ough-going plan to modernize the stage and rid 
it of the last patches and shreds of pseudo- 
Aristotelian criticism, was what playwrights 
before Diderot had lacked, and what Diderot 
meant to supply; hence the pompous, oracular 
tone with which he is sometimes reproached. 
There had no doubt been, since Corneille, some 
upholders of the moderns against the ancients, 
La Motte, Eontenelle, who had pointed to a 
dramatic ideal different from that of Classicism, 



THE DRAMATIST 317 

while Destouches, La Chaussee, even Voltaire 
had departed from tradition with success. But 
"the theories of La Motte had not resulted in 
any work likely to live; Fontenelle's comedies 
had not been performed ; and on the other hand 
the plays which had met with real success on the 
stage seemed merely to have aimed at pleasing 
the audience, rather than at the conscious appli- 
cation of a new system of poetics." 25 

But Diderot did not ignore what had been 
done before him in France to emancipate the 
stage, and, with all his admiration for the con- 
temporary English dramas, he once went so far 
as to claim for his country the honor of having 
initiated domestic tragedy, and the domestic 
novel as well, innovations of which the English 
had reaped the glory. This is what he wrote in 
1762 concerning the unsuccessful Sylvie (1742) 
of Landois: "This is the first prose tragedy 
that ever appeared on any stage " — he forgot or 
did not know that The London Merchant had 
been produced eleven years earlier. " All preju- 
dices are braved together in it ; it is in one act ; 

25 F. Gaiffe, Le Drame en France au XVIIIe siecle, p. 
154. On Destouches, Fontenelle, Marivaux, and their 
influence, see in the same work pp. 29-30. 



318 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

it takes place between characters of low degree, 
and is written in prose; this genre has given 
birth in England to The London Merchant and 
The Gamester; in Germany to Miss Sara Samp- 
son and Clementina; just as the novels of Mon- 
sieur de Marivaux have inspired Pamela, Cla- 
rissa, and Grandison. To us belongs the honor 
of having taken the first steps in those genres. 
It must be acknowledged that the boldness of 
the English genius has left us sadly behind. 
We find things; and while prejudice, criticism, 
stupidity stifle them among us, the good sense 
of foreigners seizes them, follows them up, and 
produces masterpieces and originals." 26 The 
whole fragment from which this passage is ex- 

w (Euv., VIII, 439, Pro jet d'wne Preface sent to Tru- 
daine de Montigny, who had planned to publish in one 
volume Sylvie, The London Merchant, The Gamester, and 
Miss Sara Sampson. Diderot's inaccurate assumption 
that Landois had preceded Lillo in domestic tragedy is 
less material than his hint of an influence of Marivaux 
on Richardsom This erroneous idea, founded on some 
likenesses between the two writers, was echoed by Grimm, 
President Henault, Madame du Bocage, and asserted 
by Larroumet in his Marivaux (Paris, 1882) without 
sufficient proofs. Austin Dobson, in his Eichardson 
(English Men of Letters Series, 1902) has convincingly 
shown how independent Richardson was of any French 
influence. 






THE DRAMATIST 319 

tracted clearly shows how Diderot conceived the 
historical development of the parallel movements 
which in France and England seemed about to 
modernize and democratize the stage, and of 
which he wished to be the first complete theo- 
rist. 27 In spite of the efforts of a conservative, 
pseudo-classic criticism "to defend good taste, 
the old rules, the ancient authors, our fathers, 
our masters, to stifle geniuses at their birth, to 
prolong by half a century the ennui of a nation, 
to stop art in its progress by idly strengthening 
its earlier boundaries, to pass to a bolder neigh- 
boring people the honor which an inventive 
nation would have had," 28 he believed that the 
time had come for taste to become more tolerant, 
for the rules and masters to be respectfully set 
aside, for true pathetic emotions to replace 
ennui, and for new plays to be written after the 
models of Lillo and Moore. 

It would be neither appropriate nor possible to 
review and criticize here all the dramatic system 

27 F. Gaiffe, op. cit., pp. 153 ff., clearly brings out 
Diderot's originality in this respect, against those who 
have been tempted to minimize or deny it. 

28 VIII, 441. The manifestos of Stendhal and Hugo 
hardly go beyond this. 



320 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

of Diderot. The Entretiens sur Le Fils Nature! 
in which he resorts to his favorite mode of ex- 
position, the dialogue, in settings of natural 
scenery which may be reminiscent of Shaftes- 
bury's Moralists, contain much that is intended 
to explain and defend Le Fils Naturel, together 
with plenty of criticism of the classical tra- 
dition of play-writing and acting, and occasional 
references to models or precedents in England 
and among the ancients. Diderot claimed that 
his subject was taken from life and used every 
possible effort to make his play appear like " a 
true story." He acknowledged the necessity of 
observing the three unities, "difficult to keep, 
but sensible," though he wished for a greater 
variety of stage-setting and a larger stage. He 
denned the tragedie bourgeoise in prose, as 
created by Landois, Lillo, and Moore. 29 He 

29 After paying homage to the Sylvie of Landois, 
Dorval apostrophizes Voltaire, as the only man whose 
genius could provide France with the domestic tragedies 
she lacks, and firmly establish the new genre. "But 
what wili you call that genre'?' ' he asked. — "Domestic, 
oourgeoise tragedy. The English have The London 
Merchant and The Gamester, prose tragedies. The 
tragedies of Shakespeare are half -prose, half -verse. The 
first poet who. made us laugh with prose introduced prose 



THE DRAMATIST 321 

emphasized the importance of gestures, or 
" pantomime/' against mere discourse, and con- 
sidered the emotional value of realistic, pictorial 
effects (tableaux) as much greater than that of 
stage-effects or clap-trap (coups de theatre). 
Then, in the Third Dialogue, he defined his 
own innovation, which he called the genre 
serieux, tried to justify it by the example of 
Terence, and placed it between the comic and 
the tragic, distinct from both. In his usual 
fashion, he had acknowledged English masters 
only to try and improve upon them. The Fils 
Naturelj as well as the Pere de famille, could 
not be considered as belonging to tragedy any 
more than to comedy: hence the new class in- 

into comedy. The first who makes us weep with prose 
will introduce prose into tragedy. . . . Then we shall 
see, on the stage, natural situations which a certain 
sense of propriety, inimical to genius and great effects, 
has proscribed. I shall never be weary of crying to our 
French people: 'Truth! Nature! The Ancients! Sopho- 
cles! Philoctetes! > " (VII, 120). 

This passage gave rise to an idea long current in 
France, that The Gamester was by Lillo. Similarly, in 
Diderot's latest edition, the play entitled Miss Sara 
Sampson, rightly ascribed to Lessing in VIII, 439, n., 
is described as "an English play" in XIX, 75, n. 
22 



322 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

vented by Diderot for his two plays. 30 But if 
the "serious" plays of this new kind are not 
designed to make the audience either "laugh" 
or " weep," if they are not to make any appeal 
to the emotions, it becomes difficult to see how 
they can be interesting on the stage. 

The great aim of these plays, like that of 
domestic tragedy, according to Diderot, was to 
give moral instruction, — a very undramatic 
purpose, to say the least. Whereas in the Bijoux 
Indiscrets Diderot had stated that a good play 
should tend to give the spectator the greatest 
possible illusion, he now asserted that the ob- 
ject of a dramatic composition was "to inspire 
men with love for virtue and abhorrence for 
vice" (VII, 149). This moral or utilitarian 
point of view was taken up once more and in- 
sisted upon by Diderot in his essay On Dramatic 
Poetry, in which the exposition of his doctrine 
is less hampered than in the Entretiens by 

30 This point is lost sight of by A. Eloesser, Das 
Biirgerliche Drama, p. 63, when, in the course of his 
excellent discussion of Diderot's reform, he assimilates 
domestic tragedy with the "genre serieux. " In Dide- 
rot's mind (see the beginning of the Troisieme Entretien) 
they were very distinct kinds. 



THE DRAMATIST 323 

apologies pro domo sua. The influences of 
Shaftesbury, Kichardson, and Lillo now com- 
bined with the more definite moralizing pro- 
pensity which Diderot was acquiring in art 
criticism (his first Salon was, for the year 1759). 
" Oh what good would accrue to mankind, if all 
imitative arts aimed at one common object, and 
some day concurred with the laws to make us 
love virtue and hate vice! It belongs to the 
philosopher to invite them to this : he must call 
on the poet, the painter, the musician, and 
urgently cry to them : i Men of genius, to what 
end have you received gifts from Heaven ? ' If 
they hear him, soon the images of debauchery 
shall no longer cover the walls of our palaces; 
our voices shall no longer be the organs of crime, 
and taste and morality shall gain thereby" 
(VII, 313). This would then be the task of 
"serious plays"; and Diderot had a rather 
indistinct vision of a sort of moral drama, later 
realized on the stage, yet with a good deal of 
the tragic element, in which such questions as 
duelling, suicide, and so forth, would be dis- 
cussed. 

In the course of the many precepts intended 



324 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

for beginners which fill this essay, Diderot de- 
cisively condemns the use of versification in the 
plays to be written about the middle-class, for 
the middle-class: "I have sometimes wondered 
if domestic tragedy" — we may add: and com- 
edy, and the drama — "could be written in 
verse; and, without very well knowing why, I 
answered to myself, ISTo. ... Is it that this 
genre requires a particular style of which I 
have no notion? Or because the truth of the 
subject and the intensity of the interest do not 
admit of a language ruled by symmetry? Or 
because the condition of the characters is too 
near our own to allow of regular harmony?" 
(VII, 332). In this, as in many other parts of 
his theories concerning the plays of the future, 
Diderot was right. 

To sum up, Diderot's indebtedness to the two 
English plays which he so sincerely admired, 
and to which he so often referred the reader in 
his two main works of dramatic criticism, was 
quite considerable, though not in any respect 
very close. Without them, he would no doubt 
have written Le Fils Naturel and Le Pere de 
famille, connecting these plays with the new 



THE DRAMATIST 325 

dramatic tradition created by the Sylvie of 
Landois, the Cenie of Madame de Graffigny, 
and above all the comedies of La Chaussee. But 
The London Merchant, which staged a fait- 
divers in true Elizabethan fashion, and The 
Gamester, which transposed into tragedy a char- 
acter study which Regnard had treated in a 
comedy, helped Diderot both to confirm and 
generalize his theory that everything in life 
could be made an object of dramatic imitation, 
and that of all concerns those most like our own 
would prove most interesting to us. They em- 
boldened him also to invade the hitherto sacred 
realm of French tragedy, and to ask for the 
creation in France of a tragedie bourgeoise 
similar to that of England. Although he did 
not set the example by writing one, but con- 
tented himself with a "genre serieux" which 
in spite of his assertions lacked dramatic inter- 
est, he at least advised, encouraged, and assisted 
a numerous school of young dramatists to intro- 
duce in France that new dramatic species which, 
for want of a better name, was called the drama. 31 

81 F. Gaiffe, in Le Brame en France au XVIIIe siecle, 
has proved that Diderot's theories marked the beginning 
of a new era in the history of the French stage. 



326 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

In this new kind of play, destined to become ex- 
tremely popular, prose alone was to be used ; ter- 
rible situations were no longer to be hidden be- 
hind the scenes, nor strong emotions suppressed ; 
the whole performance was to be made as "real" 
as possible, so as to penetrate the hearts of men 
with the stern, direct, and very simple morality 
which reality alone can give. 

Critics have blamed Diderot for not fore- 
seeing that he and his English models led the 
way to the inferior art of the melodrama. But 
they led the way likewise to some modern dra- 
matic forms which are as free from the cheap 
means which naturally enough were resorted to 
at first to move audiences, as from the classical 
artificiality which in his day produced nothing 
but ennui. Yet, even if the Diderotian refor- 
mation of the stage had produced nothing else 
than more or less crude melodramas, even if it 
had not been distantly beneficial to the stage in 
the romantic and in the realistic age, there is 
reason to doubt whether he would have blushed 
for his immediate progeny, the popular plays. 
From his philosophic, encyclopedic point of 
view, the masses with their easy emotions and 



THE DRAMATIST 327 

their fondness for concrete shows were as inter- 
esting as the cultured classes with their finer 
esthetic standards, and it was high time that the 
stage should offer to the Mimi Pinsons and the 
Margots some other sort of play than that which 
had delighted the Dorimenes and the Arthenices. 
As the theatre-going public was becoming more 
vast, there was no harm in making art more 
social and accessible. Indeed it is a great pity 
that the popular plays have for so many years 
been worthless from the literary standpoint; 
but only a Shakespeare has so far been able to 
please both the high and the low. 

Voltaire never agreed with Diderot concern- 
ing the reform of the French stage, but both 
were at one, and ahead of their time, in their 
great respect for the profession of acting. Di- 
derot insisted on the moral value of the theatre 
not only through a philosophic wish to justify 
it from Puritanic aspersions, to oppose the stage 
to the pulpit, and to substitute secular for 
religious morality, 32 but also to vindicate the 

32 See VII, 108-109, and 369, where he goes so far as 
to suggest that governments might use the power of the 
stage to assist legislation. In the Lettres d Mile Jodin, 
he dwelt at length on the idea that the life of an actress 
need not necessarily be an immoral life. 



328 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

dignity of the actor's art, long despised by the 
world and condemned by the Church. He was 
among the first to assert with emphasis that 
actors were not merely public amusers, but 
artists, men of genius. His acquaintance with 
David Garrick certainly influenced him here to 
no small extent. 

Only, whereas at first he had considered all 
artists, and particularly the artists of the stage, 
as exceptionally rich in sentiment, inspiration, 
or enthusiasm, and more deficient in reflective 
power than average men, he later reversed his 
judgment entirely, and, in the Paradoxe sur le 
comedien, demonstrated that the highest genius 
consisted in possessing the clearest consciousness 
of one's means of artistic expression. In 1757 
and 1758, probably generalizing from what he 
found in his own temperament, and from a 
favorite theme of Shaftesbury, he had rather 
uncritically accepted the more ordinary, obvious 
conception of genius, what one might call its 
Eomantic designation: "Poets, actors, musi- 
cians, painters, singers of the highest order, great 
dancers, fond lovers, the truly devout people, 
all that enthusiastic, passionate crowd feels in- 



THE DRAMATIST 329 

tensely, and reflects little" 33 (VII, 108). In 
1770, having analyzed the current notion con- 
cerning artists and found it wanting, he promul- 
gated and defended the Realist's definition of 
genius : 34 he required the actor to have " a great 
deal of judgment/' to be " a cold, tranquil spec- 
tator of human nature, possessing therefore 
much penetration, but no sensibilite whatever" 
(VIII, 345, 347). For why should the actor 
be different in this respect from the sculptor, the 
painter, the orator, the musician ? It is not in 
the first inspiration, under the spell of some 
" fine madness," that they accomplish their best 
work. The new idea, the "paradox," came on 
Diderot with such force that, for fuller demon- 

^Comp. Shaftesbury, Charact., Moralists (J. M. 
Robertson, vol. II, p. 129): "The transports of poets, 
the sublime of orators, the rapture of musicians, the high 
strains of the virtuosi — all mere enthusiasm! Even 
learning itself, the love of arts and curiosities, the spirit 
of travellers and adventurers, gallantry, war, heroism — 
all, all enthusiasm ! ' ' This is a comment on a part of 
the Letter concerning Enthusiasm (vol. I, p. 38) ; see 
also Miscell. Reflect, (vol. II, pp. 175-180). 

84 Flaubert will say: "The less you feel a thing, the 
more apt you are to express it as it is, . . . but you must 
have the faculty of making yourself feel it." Letter to 
Mme X., 1852 (Corresp., Charpenitier edition, vol. II, 
p. 82). 



330 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

stration, lie fondly digested it into a dialogue; 
this work, from internal evidence, appears to 
have been written in 1773 and revised in 1778. 
How can this striking change in Diderot's 
philosophy of the art of acting be accounted for ? 
It may be considered as conclusively proved 
that this volte-face was due to Diderot's ac- 
quaintance with Garrick, 35 in 1763 and 1764. 
In a Letter to Madame Riccoboni, written in 
defence of some of his statements on acting in 
the Discours sur la poesie dramatique, which 
that actress had criticized, Diderot had repre- 
sented Garrick, whom he did not yet know 
personally, as a model of that "natural" way 
of acting which he thought French players 
lacked : 

" Here is an anecdote which the Due de Duras 
will relate to you much better than I can write 
it. He was a witness to it. You know by repu- 
tation an English actor called Garrick; some 
people were one day talking in his presence 
about pantomime, and he held that, even apart 
from all discourse, there was no effect that could 
not be expected from it. Being contradicted, he 
35 We think that this was first shown by Mr. F. A. 
Hedgcock, in Garrick et ses amis frangais, Paris, 1911, 
pp. 173 ff. 



THE DRAMATIST 331 

grew warm in the dispute; driven to an ex- 
tremity, he said to his contradictors, picking up 
a cushion : * Gentlemen, I am the father of this 
child.' Then he opened a window, took his 
cushion, dandling, kissing, fondling it, and 
mimicking all the silly little ways of a father 
who plays with his child; but a moment came 
when the cushion, or rather the child, slipped 
from his hands and fell out of the window. 
Garrick then began to mimic the father's de- 
spair. Ask the Due de Duras what happened. 
The spectators were struck with such violent 
consternation and terror that most of them with- 
drew. Do you believe that Garrick was thinking 
then whether he was seen in the face or side- 
ways, whether his action was proper or not, 
whether his gestures were well compassed, his 
movements in cadence?" (VII, 402). 

In 1770, bestiam mugientem audiverat, Di- 
derot had seen and heard "the monster him- 
self," and had had another demonstration of the 
power of pantomime. This is how he spoke of 
his experience : 36 

38 In his ' ' Observations on a pamphlet entitled l Garrick 
or the English Actors,' a work containing reflections on 
the dramatic art, the art of performing and the manner 
of playing of actors, with historical and critical notes on 
the various theatres of London and Paris, translated 
from the English' ' (by Antonio Fabio Sticoti, actoT). 
This book, published in 1769, was reviewed by Diderot 



332 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

" I repeat that I shall not be swayed by the 
man who is beside himself, but by the man who 
is cool, self-possessed, the master of his own 
face, voice, actions, movements, and play. Gar- 
rick shows his head in a folding-door, and in 
two seconds I see his face pass quickly from 
extreme joy to astonishment, from astonish- 
ment to sadness, from sadness to dejection, from 
dejection to despair, and return with the same 
rapidity from the point where he is to the point 
whence he had started. Has his soul been able 
successively to experience all those passions, 
and, in concert with his face, to go through that 
sort of gamut ? I believe nothing of the sort " 
(VIII, 352). 

Though players are not willing to confess it, 
they do not act according to nature, but accord- 
ing to art ; their gestures, the varied expressions 
of their faces are all learnt by heart. Could 
anything more preposterous be imagined than a 
coordination of several individual sensibilities 
with a view to a dramatic performance ? Garrick 
had told Diderot that the art of acting Shake- 
speare had nothing in common with the art of 
acting Eacine (VIII, 344, 364) ; it was alto- 

in these Observations, the first draft of the Paradox, for 
Grimm's Correspondance Litteravre (Oct. 1, Nov. 15, 
1770). 



THE DRAMATIST 333 

gether another set of principles. Garrick's 
great versatility, his ability to impersonate the 
most opposite characters at a moment's notice, 
was a proof of the degree of self-consciousness 
and self-mastery to which he had attained : 

"If you asked this celebrated man, who de- 
serves to be made the sole object of a trip to 
England, as much as all the remains of Rome 
deserve the trouble of a journey to Italy, if, I 
say, you asked him for the scene of the Little 
Baker's Boy, he played it for you ; if you asked 
him at once for the scene of Hamlet, he played 
it for you, just as ready to weep over the fall 
of his buns as to follow in the air the path of 
a dagger" (VIII, 382). 

With a profusion of reflections and examples, 
Diderot proceeded to show that the player did 
not and could not play from nature, but from an 
ideal model created by him in his mind. For 
this he again appealed to " his dear Roscius," as 
he called Garrick, in a glowing apostrophe : 

" I call you for my witness, English Roscius, 
famous Garrick, you who by the universal con- 
sent of all existing nations, are reputed the first 
actor they have ever known, pay an homage to 
the truth ! Have you not told me that, however 
strongly you felt, your action would be but 
feeble, if, for any passion or character you had 



334 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

to express, you did not know how to rise in 
thought to the greatness of a Homeric phantom 
with which you tried to identify yourself ? As 
I objected that it was not after yourself then 
that you played, confess your answer: did you 
not acknowledge that you took good care not to 
do it, and that the only reason for your appear- 
ing so wonderful on the stage was, that in the 
theatre you always showed an imaginary being 
which was not you?" 37 (VIII, 396). 

It is probable that Garrick, while recognizing 
the necessity of working as a rule from " emo- 
tions recollected in a mood of tranquillity," had 
made some reservations — which should be the 
corrective part of the Paradox — respecting the 
occasions when the actor is carried away as well 
as his audience and shares in their illusion. 

Thus, as a conclusion of his Paradoxe sur le 
comedien,T)i&erot had found that " enthusiasm," 
la sensibilite, which he had formerly considered 
as the living flame which fed souls of genius, 

37 In this connection Diderot also quotes, p. 421, from 
a letter in the St. James* Chronicle, the English actor 
Macklin, who, apologizing to the audience for daring to 
take up the part of Macbeth after Garrick, had said that 
"the impressions which subjugated the player and made 
him submissive to the genius and inspiration of the poet 
were very bad for him. " Compare also Dr Johnson's 
boutade to Kemble quoted hereafter (Chapt. VIII, p. 
431, n.). 



THE DRAMATIST 335 

were elements of weakness in the accomplish- 
ment of any great work. " The man of senti- 
ment is too much at the mercy of his diaphragm 
to be a great king, a great politician, a great 
magistrate, a just man, a deep observer, and 
consequently a sublime imitator of nature." 
And he said in the same breath : " Besides, when 
I pronounced that sensibility was the character- 
istic of a good soul and a mediocre genius, I 
made a confession which was rather uncommon, 
for if Nature ever kneaded a sensitive soul, it 
was mine" (VIII, 408). There, it will be 
noticed in passing, was indeed Diderot's great 
weakness as a dramatist. If he failed in prac- 
tice, while his theories contained much that was 
valuable and gave him many disciples in France 
and abroad, it was because of his exuberant, 
romantic personality, which constantly burst 
forth in fits of moralizing and sentiment. His 
friend the Abbe d'Arnaud told him once that 
while other dramatists identified themselves 
with their characters he on the contrary identi- 
fied all his characters with himself. He imag- 
ined them acting as he himself would have done 
in their plight, crying out, weeping, gesticulat- 
ing, discoursing, "not minding the audience 
any more than if it was not there," and sadly 



336 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

indulging in that most unpathetic of all human 
moods, self-pity. 38 He lacked objectivity, the 
gift of Realism in creation, the art of investing 
personal elements, subjective emotions vividly 
recollected, with that impersonal aspect which 
makes them endure. At least he clearly dis- 
cerned once what his failing was and what his 
error had been; and there is reason to believe 
that to this error he acknowledged that his 
dramatic failures were due. 39 He may pos- 
sibly have remembered then the praise given in 
Aristotle's Poetics to Homer, whom he was 
wont to read so religiously : " Homer, deserving 
of praise for many other things, is especially to 
be praised because he, alone of all poets, knows 
what part to take himself. For the poet in his 
own person should speak as little as may be ; for 
he is not an imitator in speaking himself — 
avTov yap Set top iroii)Tr)v iXaxurra \eyeiv • ov 
yap €<tti Kara ravra fiifirjTrjs. — Now, other poets 
are on the stage themselves throughout, and 
their imitations are few and rare." 

38 " The less a suffering man complains, the more he 
touches me,'' Diderot wrote concerning the much admired 
group of statuary which in 1766 inspired Lessing's 
Laocoon (Pensees detacJiees sur la peinture, XII, 117). 

39 See, in VII, 311, his frank misgivings about his 
treatment of Le Pere de famille. 



CHAPTEK VII 

THE NOVELIST 

There is no reason to doubt that Diderot 
attached much more importance to his plays 
than he ever did to his novels. While his two 
plays were, as one might say, his main publica- 
tions besides the Encyclopedie, and appeared 
with all the pomp and circumstance of a dra- 
matic manifesto, his novels were published in a 
straggling manner between 1748 and 1830, some 
before his death, but the larger number post- 
humously. Not one among them carried with it 
any preface, programme, or critical essay — a 
singular thing for Diderot — and nowhere can 
any sign be found that the author had any inter- 
est in the value or the fate of his attempts in 
fiction. He very probably believed that as a 
genre the novel was susceptible of many new 
and useful developments ; but he never digested 
his thoughts on this subject, as he had done for 
dramatic literature, in some half -dogmatic, half- 
apologetic body of doctrine. 

There is, however, a fairly close relationship 
23 337 



338 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

between Diderot's dramatic theory and his 
ideas concerning the novel. He was not inter- 
ested in the ancient form of romance, whether 
founded on the chivalrous notions of love and 
honor, as it had been revived in France in the 
seventeenth century, or on wonder and mystery, 
as it was being revived by his contemporary 
Horace Walpole; all this must have seemed as 
artificial and obsolete to him as classical trag- 
edy. !Nor did he seem to believe in the future 
of the picaresque novel, as he found it for in- 
stance in Le Sage and his English followers, 
Fielding and Smollett, any more than he be- 
lieved in satirical comedy. If we try to 
supply, from his appreciations on Richardson, 
the main features of what he would have con- 
sidered the ideal of the novel, this form should 
have essentially been like the drama, realistic, 
"bourgeois," and moral. In order to conform 
to " nature," or reality, the characters in a novel 
should be taken from the middle-class, the setting 
from modern surroundings, and the incidents 
from everyday life. To convey the moral in- 
struction which he was inclined to consider as 
the principal function of art, the novel should 
deal with some great topics of ethics affecting 



THE NOVELIST 339 

all men, such as the duties of parents to their 
children and of children to their parents, the 
question of marriage, and whatever pertains to 
the relations between the sexes. 

This realism in character-study and in de- 
scription, together with an omnipresent moral 
purpose, he had found in the novels of Samuel 
Richardson: Pamela (1740), Clarissa Harlowe 
(1748), and Sir Charles Grandison (1754). 
These works had early been translated into 
French by the Abbe Prevost; Pamela in 1742, 
Clarissa in 1751, Grandison in two parts in 
1755 and 1757. Clarissa was translated also 
by Le Tourneur in 1758, and Grandison by G. 
F. Monod in 1756. Prevost had not hesitated 
to abridge and polish the English original : " I 
have suppressed or reduced to the common 
usages of Europe," he wrote in his Preface to 
Grandison^ "whatever in the manners of Eng- 
land might be shocking to other nations. It has 
seemed to me that those traces of the ancient 
British grossness, to which only the force of 
habit can still blind the English, would dis- 
honor a book in which politeness must go hand 
in hand with nobleness and virtue." Many tell- 



340 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

ing incidents were thus sacrificed as "low," 
"indecent," "too long and very English," or 
"revolting." 1 Diderot must have read the 
novels of Richardson almost as fast as they 
appeared, while Prevost was engaged in giving 
those elegant adaptations of them. In a letter 
to Mile Volland (Oct. 20, 1760), Diderot writes 
that Clarissa had just been the occasion of heated 
discussions in the circle of Baron d'Holbach at 
Grandval : 

"Those who despised that work despised it 
supremely; those who prized it, as excessive in 
their esteem as the others were in their con- 
tempt, looked upon it as one of the highest 
achievements of the human mind. I have the 
book: I am very sorry you did not put it in 
your box. I shall not be satisfied with you or 
with myself until I have brought you to relish 
the truth of Pamela, Tom Jones, Clarissa, and 
Grandison" (XVIII, 514). 

One year later, Sophie Volland had perused 
at least Clarissa Harlowe, probably in the Eng- 
lish original; for we read that she had been 
greatly moved by the account of Clarissa's 
funeral, which the French translator had sup- 

1 Quoted in J. Teste, J.-J. Bousseau . . ., 1895, pp. 
195-197. 



THE NOVELIST 341 

pressed out of respect for French taste, and 
which only appeared in French in 1762, in a 
Supplement aux lettres anglaises de Miss Cld- 
risse Harlowe. 

"What you tell me concerning the funeral 
and the will of Clarissa," Diderot writes, Sept. 
17, 1761, "I had also felt; it is but one more 
proof of the likeness between our souls. Only 
a little while ago, my eyes filled again with 
tears. I could no longer read, I arose, and began 
to grieve, to apostrophize the brother, the sister, 
the father, the mother, and the uncles, talking 
aloud, to Damilaville's great amazement, who 
could not make anything out of my transport 
and my speech, and asked me what I was after. 
It is certain that such reading is very unwhole- 
some after meals, and that you do not choose the 
right time; it is before a walk that one should 
take up the book. There is not one letter in 
which two or three moral topics could not be 
found for discussion" (XIX, 47). 

Shortly after, Sophie having probably related 
to Diderot some good action which she had per- 
formed, he replies (Sept. 22, 1761): "Well, 
there is a good effect of that reading. Now 
imagine that book disseminated over the whole 
surface of the earth, and Richardson will thus 
be the author of a hundred good actions a day. 



342 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Imagine that he will do some good to all coun- 
tries, many centuries after his death." Rich- 
ardson had died July 4, 1761, a little over two 
months before this letter was written, and Di- 
derot was already thinking of writing an Eloge 
of him. In this same letter however he sug- 
gests how he would have improved the plot of 
Clarissa: had it been left to him, he tells Mile 
Volland, he would have contrived to bring Miss 
Howe and Lovelace face to face, in accordance 
with some hints given to that effect by Eichard- 
son : 2 " That petulant girl does nothing but talk : 
I should have liked to see her in action. Cla- 
rissa is a lamb fallen under the teeth of a wolf, 
she has nothing to protect her but her timidity, 
penetration, and prudence; Miss Howe would 
have been a better match for Lovelace. These 
two would have given each other much to do. 
... If things had happened as I wish, Cla- 
rissa would have been saved. ... In order to 
save her I should not have been sorry to make 
her friend run a few risks " (XIX, 50) . Sophie 
Volland did not approve of this suggestion, and 

2 See Letters 24 and 34, in vol. Ill of Clarissa (vol. 
VI of the Works), in The Works of 8. Bichardson, with 
Introd. by Leslie Stephen, 1883, 12 vols. 



THE NOVELIST 343 

she certainly was right from the moral as well 
as from the artistic standpoint : for where would 
have the pathetic catastrophe been ? And what 
would the novel have gained? A few more of 
those risque scenes, with their disgusting sug- 
gestiveness, in which Richardson, Diderot and 
their "age of sentiment" delighted, at the 
expense of a scene of lasting beauty, the tragic 
end of the heroine. 

Meanwhile Sophie Volland, her sisters, and 
her mother had further discussed Lovelace and 
agreed that it would indeed be a good thing if 
all men like him were to be killed. Thereupon 
Diderot, questioning the right of such executions 
even in the abstract, undertakes to defend the 
composite character of Richardson's libertine 
with great ingenuity (Sept. 28, 1761) : 

"That man Lovelace has a charming face, 
which really pleases you as it does everybody, 
and in your mind you keep an image of him 
which is truly captivating; his soul has some- 
thing noble, he has education, knowledge, all 
agreeable talents, agility, strength, courage; 
there is nothing base in his wickedness; it is 
impossible for you to despise him; you prefer 
to die a Lovelace, by the hand of Captain Mor- 
den, than to live a Solmes ; in the main, we like 



344 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

a half-good, half-bad individual better than an 
indifferent person. We trust our luck or our 
cleverness to make us foil his wickedness, and 
we hope to profit on occasion by his goodness. 
Do you believe that anyone under the heavens 
could with impunity have dared to make Cla- 
rissa suffer a hundredth part of the injuries she 
receives from Lovelace? It is something to 
have a persecutor who, while he torments us, 
protects us against all that surrounds and threat- 
ens us. And then, you entertain some presenti- 
ment that this man, who hardened his heart so 
much against another, would have softened 
towards you" (XIX, 55). 

The result of all these discussions concerning 
the works of Eichardson and of the reflections 
which Diderot had made for some twenty years 
on the art of the English novelist is embodied 
in the famous Eloge de Richardson which Di- 
derot wrote some time towards the end of 176 1, 
for publication in the Journal Etranger (Janu- 
ary, 1762), then edited by a great admirer of 
England, Suard. The unbounded admiration, 
often rising to a pitch of lyric enthusiasm, 
which pervades the whole of this piece, may 
seem unaccountable and paradoxical. But it 
must be remembered, first, that it was intended 
as a sort of funeral oration, in which adverse 



THE NOVELIST 345 

criticism would have been a little out of place ; 
secondly, that Diderot's natural self was exag- 
gerated, that his normal speech always ran in 
superlatives, especially when the topic on hand 
was the " return " of art to nature and to virtue. 
Thus he threw down his thoughts on paper, 
"without connection, order, or premeditated 
design, as they were inspired to him in the 
tumult of his heart" (V, 212), trying only to 
express the meaning which the novels of Rich- 
ardson had for him and which he trusted they 
would have for posterity. 

He admired in Richardson a natural world, 
characters taken from the middle ranks of so- 
ciety, incidents and passions which are always 
and everywhere to be found. Richardson sows 
the germs of virtue in our hearts. He excells 
in giving voice to the passions and making peo- 
ple of all conditions speak each in his own way. 
He strengthens the feeling of commiseration for 
those who suffer. His so-called lengthy style is 
characteristic of true imitation : for it is by the 
multitude of common details that illusion is 
created; his clear vision of reality soars above 
the "petty taste" of the age. His characters 
are almost numberless, yet all so alive that the 



346 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

readers cannot help discussing them as though 
they were real persons. The immense variety 
of nuances which he uses makes his fiction 
truer than history ; his characters are not excep- 
tional and particular, but human and universal. 
His art is deep and hidden; Diderot has often 
read Clarissa in order to " train himself," and 
has forgotten his intention at the twentieth page 
(V, 221). Liking or disliking the works of 
Richardson, he concludes, is a good test of a 
man's inmost nature. " For me, the people who 
dislike them are judged. Never have I talked 
about them to any man whom I esteemed, with- 
out trembling lest his judgment should not 
agree with mine. Never have I met anyone 
who shared my enthusiasm without feeling 
tempted to hug him in my arms." Two ladies 
had had to sever their friendship, because one 
of them could not help laughing at Eichardson, 
whom the other admired; and this latter wrote 
to Diderot: "I must confess that it is a great 
curse to feel and think as she does; so great, 
that I would rather see my daughter die at once 
in my arms than to know her to be thus cursed. 
My daughter ! . . . Yes, I have thought over it, 
and do not take it back" (V, 224). Between 



THE NOVELIST 347 

the two attitudes which Diderot tells us his con- 
temporaries took towards Richardson, one of 
supreme contempt, the other of unbounded, 
"exaggerated" admiration, Diderot unhesi- 
tatingly chose the latter. He was conscious of 
its exaggeration, but, being convinced that the 
novels of Eichardson were excellent both morally 
and artistically, he thought that exaggeration 
was no fault in a good cause. As some later 
critics have been tempted to react rather strongly 
against the worship of Eichardson, it is better 
here to let Diderot himself speak, and explain 
his attitude: 

" By a novel, one had hitherto meant a fabric 
of chimerical, frivolous events, the perusal of 
which was dangerous for taste and morals. I 
should very much like another name to be found 
for the works of Eichardson, which elevate the 
mind, touch the soul, are inspired throughout 
with love for the good, and which are also called 
novels. 3 

" All that Montaigne, Charron, La Eochef ou- 
cauld, and Nicole have put in maxims, Eichard- 
son has put in action. But a thoughtful mind, 
3 The French word "roman" applies equally well to 
the two kinds of fiction called in English "novel" and 
li romance, ' ' while the French "nouvelle ,, is the "short 
story. ' ' This however is not very material for the trans- 
lation of this passage. 



348 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

reading the works of Richardson with reflection, 
makes anew most of the maxims of the moral- 
ists, whereas with all those maxims he would 
not be able to make one page of Richardson. 

"A maxim is an abstract, general rule of 
conduct, the application of which is left to us. 
By itself, it does not impress any sensible image 
on our mind: but he who acts is seen, we put 
ourselves in his place or by his side, we grow 
excited for or against him; we enter into the 
part he plays, if he is virtuous ; we shun it with 
indignation, if he is unjust or vicious. Who 
has not shuddered at the character of a Love- 
lace or a Tomlinson ? Who has not been struck 
with horror by the pathetic and true tone, the 
look of candor and dignity, the profound art 
with which the latter impersonates all virtues % 
Who has not in his inmost heart said that we 
should flee from society and take refuge in the 
depth of the forests if there were a number of 
such crafty dissemblers ? 

" O Richardson ! in spite of ourselves we 
must take a part in your works, we mingle in 
the conversation, we blame, approve, admire, 
are angry or indignant. How often have I 
caught myself crying out, as some children 
have done when they were first taken to a play : 
'Do not believe him, he deceives you. ... If 
you go there, you are lost.' My soul was in a 
state of perpetual agitation. How good I was ! 
how just! how well satisfied with myself! 
After reading you, I was as a man is at the 



THE NOVELIST 349 

close of a day devoted by him to doing good. 
In the space of a few hours, I had traversed 
a great number of situations, which the longest 
life hardly offers through the whole of its dura- 
tion. I had heard the true discourse of the 
passions ; I had seen the mainsprings of interest 
and self-love play in a hundred different ways ; 
I had become the spectator of a multitude of 
incidents; I felt that I had gained experience. 

" This author does not shed blood beside wain- 
scotted walls; he does not take you into far- 
distant lands; he does not expose you to the 
danger of being devoured by savages ; he never 
loses his way into the realms of fairyland. 
The world where we live is the scene of his 
action; the matter of his drama is true; his 
actors have all the reality we may wish for; 
his characters are taken from the middle ranks 
of society ; his incidents from the manners of all 
civilized nations ; the passions which he depicts 
are the same that I experience in myself; the 
same objects inspire them, they have all the 
power which I know them to possess ; the diffi- 
culties and afflictions of his characters are of 
the same kind as constantly threaten me; he 
shows me the general course of things around 
me. Without this art, my soul, unwillingly 
accepting chimerical contrivances, would feel 
but a momentary illusion, and a weak, transi- 
tory impression. 

"What is virtue? From whatever point of 
view we consider it, it is a sacrifice of oneself. 



350 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

The sacrifice made of oneself in idea predis- 
poses one to self-immolation in reality. 

" Richardson sows in our hearts the germs of 
virtue, which at first remain there idle and dor- 
mant: they are hidden there until an occasion 
comes to make them move and germinate. 
Then they develop; we feel carried to the ac- 
complishment of good with an eagerness that 
we did not suspect in ourselves. At the sight 
of injustice, we experience a revolt for which 
we cannot account. It is because we have as- 
sociated with Richardson, because we have con- 
versed with a good man, in moments when the 
disinterested soul lay open to the truth. 

"I still remember the day when the works 
of Richardson fell into my hands for the first 
time: I was in the country. What delicious 
impression that reading made on me ! At every 
passing moment I saw my bliss grow shorter 
by one page. I soon experienced the same sen- 
sation as men would feel who, bound by pleas- 
ant intercourse and having long lived together, 
might be on the point of separation. At the 
end, it suddenly seemed to me that I had re- 
mained all alone. . . . 

"He has left me in a state of melancholy 
which is pleasing and lasting; people some- 
times notice it, and ask me : ' What is the mat- 
ter? You are not your natural self; what has 
happened to you?' They inquire about my 
health, my fortune, my relatives, my friends. 
O my friends ! Pamela, Clarissa, and Grandi- 






THE NOVELIST 351 

son are three great dramas! Torn from that 
reading by serious occupations, I felt an uncon- 
querable distaste for them; I gave up the task 
and resumed Richardson's book. Take good 
care not to open those enchanting works when 
you have any duties to perform. 

" Who has ever read the works of Richardson 
without wishing to know that man, to have him 
for a brother or for a friend? Who has not 
wished him every blessing ? 

"O Richardson, Richardson, man unique in 
my eyes, thou shalt be my reading at all times ! 
Compelled by pressing needs, if my friend 
falls into poverty, if my mediocre fortune does 
not suffice to give my children the cares neces- 
sary for their education, I will sell my books; 
but thou shalt remain with me, thou shalt re- 
main with me on the same shelf as Moses, 
Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles, and I will 
read you by turns. . . . 4 

" I have heard my author reproached for his 
details, which were taxed with prolixity: how 
impatient those strictures have made me ! 

"Woe to the man of genius who oversteps 
the bounds prescribed by custom and time to 
the productions of art, and tramples underfoot 
the protocol and its formulas! Long years 
4 It was in 1763, according to Mme de Vandeul, in 
1765, according to Meister, that Diderot sold his library 
to the empress of Kussia, in order to provide a dowry 
for his daughter, who in 1763 was twelve years old. We 
are not aware that he then reserved this ' ' five-foot shelf. ' ' 



352 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

shall pass after his death before he receives the 
just treatment he deserves. 

" Yet let us be equitable. In the midst of a 
nation carried away by a thousand distractions, 
where the day is not sufficient with its twenty- 
four hours for the amusements with which 
people have grown accustomed to fill it, Rich- 
ardson's books must seem long. It is for the 
same reason that this nation already has no 
opera left, and that by and by only detached 
scenes of comedy and tragedy will be performed 
in its other theatres. 

"My dear fellow-citizens, if the novels of 
Eichardson seem long- to you, why don't you 
abridge them ? Be consequent with yourselves. 
You hardly go to the performance of a tragedy 
except to see the last act. Skip at once to the 
last twenty pages of Clarissa. 

" Eichardson's details are and cannot but be 
unpleasant to a frivolous, dissipated man; but 
he did not write for that man ; he wrote for the 
quiet, solitary man who has known the vanity of 
the din and the amusements of the world, who 
loves to dwell in the shade of some retreat and 
to feel useful emotions in silence. 

"You charge Eichardson with being prolix! 
Have you then forgotten how many troubles, 
cares, pains are required to succeed in the least 
undertaking, to end a law-suit, make a match, 
bring about a reconciliation ? Think what you 
like of those details ; but they will be interesting 
to me, if they are true, if they bring out the 
passions, if they depict the characters. 



THE NOVELIST 353 

" You say, ' They are common ; they are what 
we see every day ! ' You are mistaken ; they 
are what takes place every day before your 
eyes and you never see. Take care: you are 
attacking the greatest poets under the name of 
Kichardson. A hundred times have you seen 
the sunset and the stars rising, heard the fields 
resound with the loud song of birds; but who 
among you has felt that it was the noise of day 
which made the silence of night more affecting ? 
Well, it is the same with you for the moral as 
for the physical phenomena: the outbursts of 
the passions have often struck your ears; but 
you are very far from knowing all that is secret 
in their accents and expressions. Not one of 
them but has its physiognomy; and all these 
physiognomies succeed one another on one hu- 
man face while it still remains the same; and 
the art of the great poet and the great painter 
is to show you a fleeting circumstance which 
had escaped you. 

" Painters, poets, men of taste, virtuous men, 
read Kichardson, read him constantly. 

" Know that on this multitude of small things 
the illusion depends: there is much difficulty 
in imagining them, much more in rendering 
them. The bodily gesture is sometimes as sub- 
lime as the word ; and then it is through all this 
truth in details that the soul becomes prepared 
for the strong impressions of great events. 
When your impatience has been suspended by 
those momentary delays which acted upon it as 



354 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

a dike, with what impetuosity will it rush forth 
as soon as it pleases the poet to break them! 
It is then that, sunken in grief or transported 
with joy, you will not have the strength to keep 
back your tears ready to flow, and to say to 
yourself : ' But perhaps this is not true.' Such 
a thought had been gradually removed farther 
and farther from you; and it is so far that it 
will not occur. 

" An idea which sometimes came to me while 
reading the works of Richardson is, that I had 
bought an old castle; that, exploring its apart- 
ments one day, I had seen in an angle a closet 
that had not been opened for a long time, and 
that on bursting it open I had found pell mell 
some letters of Clarissa and Pamela. After 
having read a few, how eagerly would I have 
arranged them according to their dates! How 
distressed should I have been, if there had been 
any gap among them! Do you think that I 
would have suffered a bold (I had almost said, 
sacrilegious) hand to have suppressed one line ? 

" You who have only read the works of Rich- 
ardson in your elegant French translation, and 
who think that you know them, are mistaken. 

u You do not know Lovelace ; you do not know 
Clementina; you do not know the unfortunate 
Clarissa ; you do not know Miss Howe, her dear 
tender Miss Howe, since you have not seen her 
dishevelled, prostrate over her friend's coffin, 
wringing her hands, raising towards heaven her 
eyes flooded with tears, filling the house of the 



THE NOVELIST 355 

Harlowes with her shrieks, and loading with 
curses all that cruel family; you are ignorant 
of the effect produced by those circumstances 
which your petty taste would suppress, since 
you have not heard the dismal sound of the 
parish bells, carried by the wind over the dwell- 
ing of the Harlowes, and waking remorse which 
lay slumbering in those stony hearts, since you 
have not seen how they shuddered on hearing 
the wheels of the chariot which bore the corpse 
of their victim. It was then that the mournful 
silence which reigned in their midst was broken 
by the sobs of the father and the mother ; it was 
then that the real torture of those wicked souls 
began, that serpents stirred in the depth of their 
hearts and tore them. Happy were those who 
were able to weep ! . . . 

"Bichardson is no more. What a loss for 
literature and for mankind ! This loss has af- 
fected me as though he had been my own brother. 
I carried him in my heart without having seen 
him, without knowing him otherwise than 
through his works. 

"I have never met one of his countrymen, 
or one of mine who has traveled to England, 
without asking : ' Have you seen the poet Rich- 
ardson ? ' And then : c Have you seen the phi- 
losopher Hume?' . . . 

" O Eichardson ! if in thy lifetime thou hast 
not enjoyed all the reputation that thou didst 
deserve, how great thou shalt be among our de- 
scendants, when they see thee at the distance 



356 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

from which we view Homer! Then who will 
dare tear a line out of thy sublime work ? Thou 
hast had more admirers among us than even 
in thy country; and I am glad of it. Ages, 
hasten to flow by, and bring with you the honors 
that are due to Eichardson! I call to witness 
all those who listen to me: I have not awaited 
the example of other people to pay homage to 
thee; this very day I was bowed at the foot of 
thy statue ; I worshipped thee, trying to find in 
the depth of my soul words fitting the extent of 
my admiration for thee, and I could find none. 
You who glance over these lines which I wrote 
without any connection, design, or order, as 
they were inspired to me in the tumult of my 
heart, if you have received from heaven a soul 
more sensitive than mine, erase them. The 
genius of Richardson has stifled whatever genius 
I had. His phantoms constantly wander in my 
imagination; if I want to write, I hear Clem- 
entina's complaint; Clarissa's shadow appears; 
I see Grandison walking before me; Lovelace 
disturbs me, and my fingers let my pen drop. 
And you, sweeter apparitions, Emilia, Char- 
lotte, Pamela, dear Miss Howe, while I con- 
verse with you, the years of work and the har- 
vest of laurels pass by; and I advance towards 
my last term, without attempting aught that 
might commend me also to the ages to come" 
(V, 212-227). 

This eulogy, in which a large element of sin- 



i 



THE NOVELIST 357 

cerity is strangely blended with "enthusiasm" 
and rhetoric, and in which a taste superior to 
traditional canons is occasionally deceived by an 
" almost fanatical admiration/' 5 may well give 
rise to the question whether Diderot was not 
inspired by Eichardson to write some work of 
fiction that might commend his own name to 
posterity. For Diderot very willingly imitated 
whatever he thought worthy of admiration, and, 
without meaning any disrespect to him, there 
was much in the good philosopher's character 
that reminds one of the self-confident and ver- 
satile Bottom : " I will play the Lion too ! " 
Indeed, far from stifling his inventive genius, 
the influence of Eichardson seems to have urged 
him about 1760 to enter a path which he had 
not yet attempted. 

In saying this, we ignore those Bijoux Indis- 
crets of 1748, which are said to have caused 
their author much shame and regret in later 
years, as La Fontaine in his old age rued his 
licentious Tales. They belonged to a sorry 
class of writings, licentious for mere indecency's 
sake, to which every age and country has more 

"Leslie Stephen, The Novels of Eichardson, in the 
Works of S. Eichardson, ed. cit., vol. I. 



358 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

or less contributed. The medieval grossness of 

the original of the Bijoux, an anonymous 

" merry tale," was but thinly veiled in the more 

polished style of the eighteenth-century writer. 

If we once more mention here this peche de 

j.eunesse, it is because the influence of that kind 

of writing is perhaps not altogether absent from 

Diderot's next work in fiction. 

This book, La Religieuse, was written in 

1760 and left in an unfinished shape among 

the papers of Diderot. It was posthumously 

published by ISTaigeon in 1796. It is in the 

form of a long letter, or memoir, supposed to be 

founded on facts: 6 it is the story of an unfor- 

6 For the foundation, or rather the pretext on which the 
story was built, see the Preface-Annexe de La Religieuse 
(V, 175, with the note by Naigeon). Yet we may wonder 
whether the whole memoir of the unhappy nun was indeed 
nothing but a contrivance imagined by Diderot and his 
friends to interest the absent M. de Croismare and drag 
him out of his country seat in Normandy back to the 
circle of Baron d'Holbach. It is not improbable that 
the first suggestion of the story came from what Diderot 
in 1760 knew of the life of Mile de Lespinasse. The 
birth and the convent life of Sister Suzanne Simonin 
have much in common with those of Mile de Lespinasse: 
see de Segur, Mile de Lespinasse. "We know that Diderot, 
if he did not think of D'Alembert when he wrote Le Fils 
Naturel, at least thought of himself in composing Le 



THE NOVELIST 359 

tunate girl, of illegitimate birth, thrust by her 
mother and her legal father in a convent, against 
her will, to expiate her mother's sin. Her ex- 
perience in the first two houses which she enters 
on trial, particularly in the second convent, 
under the authority of an abbess who is repre- 
sented as a real saint and an excellent woman, 
convinces her that she is not fitted for the mo- 
nastic life: not that she has any fondness for 
worldly life, or any kind of attachments in the 
outer world, but because her independent spirit 
loathes the life of a recluse. Yet, having taken 
the veil out of a feeling of duty to her mother 
and self-sacrifice to her family, the persecutions 
which she suffers under a narrow-minded and 
ferocious abbess who succeeds her saintly pro- 
tectress induce her at length to ask for the re- 
scinding of her vows. This step, which was no 
simple matter in pre-revolutionary France, 
brings about a recrudescence of cruel treatment 
against the poor wretch. Taken to another con- 
vent, under the rule of an abbess who suffers 
from a nervous disease, she is made as miserable 

Pere de famille. He had a great propensity, uncom- 
fortable to those who were acquainted with him, of 
staging himself and, everyone he knew: see the Beve de 
D'Alembert, the play Est-il ton? est-il mechanic etc. 



360 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

by this woman's affection as she had been by 
the other's cruelty. She escapes from this last 
establishment shortly after the mad woman's 
death, and her subsequent adventures, which 
lack a conclusion, are merely sketched in a few 
pages. 

This book "was undoubtedly an expression of 
the strong feeling of the Encyclopaedic school 
about celibacy, renunciation of the world, and 
the burial of men and women alive in the clois- 
ter." 7 It was also a realistic, scientific study 
of the normal and abnormal psychology of hu- 
man beings living in seclusion. Richardson 
had described the dangers and miseries that 
may assail innocent and virtuous girls in the 
world; Diderot showed what misfortunes may 
befall them outside of the family circle and so- 
ciety, in houses intended as refuges from the 
temptations and wickedness of the world. 

Suzanne Simonin, the !N"un, presents some 

features which remind the reader of Clarissa, 

Pamela, and sometimes perhaps of the unhappy 

Clementina. Like the first two of Eichardson's 

7 J. Morley, Diderot . . ., vol. II, p. 32. On this sub- 
ject, Diderot had expressed himself strongly in the 
articles "Celibat" and "Passager" of the Encyclopedic. 



THE NOVELIST 361 

heroines, she is blessed with very many gifts of 
soul and body, of which she is not altogether 
unconscious. When, in a state of dazed de- 
spair, she first dons the monastic habit, she is 
still able to hear without displeasure the compli- 
mentary remarks of the other nuns on her out- 
ward appearance: "'Just look, sister, how 
beautiful she is! how that black veil enhances 
the whiteness of her complexion ! how well that 
band suits her ! how it rounds off her face ! how 
it expands her cheeks! how that habit fits her 
waist and her arms ! ' . . . I hardly listened to 
them; I was desolate; however, I must confess 
that, when I was alone in my cell, I recollected 
their flatteries ; I could not help verifying them 
in my little looking-glass ; and it seemed to me 
that they were not altogether undeserved." 8 
Like Clarissa, she has been treated by her fam- 
ily with a harshness that her merits have not 
been able to disarm, but have rather increased. 
The initial motives of this exceptional treat- 
ment are in both cases financial considerations 
and a marriage transaction, to which is added, 

8 V, 15. Compare the innocent, naive coquetry of 
Pamela, in Works of S. Richardson, ed. cit., vol. I, pp. 
42, 53, etc. 



362 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

for Diderot's heroine, the mystery of an irregu- 
lar birth later unravelled by her. 

. " My father was a barrister. He had mar- 
ried my mother when he was somewhat ad- 
vanced in years ; by her he had three daughters. 
He had a greater fortune than was necessary 
to settle them comfortably; but in order to do 
that he should at least have divided his love 
equally between us, and I am far from being 
able to give his love this praise. I certainly 
excelled my sisters in wit and looks, in temper 
and talents ; and it seemed as though my parents 
were grieved by this. As all the advantages 
which nature and application had given me over 
them became for me a source of sorrows, from 
my earliest years I wished to resemble them, in 
order always to be loved, petted, fondled, ex- 
cused as they were. If someone happened to 
tell my mother that 'she had charming chil- 
dren/ that was never meant for me. I was 
sometimes well revenged for that injustice ; but 
the praises which I had received cost me so dear 
as soon as we were alone, that I should have pre- 
ferred indifference or even insults; the greater 
the preference which strangers had shown for 
me, the bitterer the ill-humor from which I suf- 
fered after they had gone. Oh ! how often have 
I cried for not having been born ugly, silly, 
stupid, proud; in a word, with all the faults 



THE NOVELIST 363 

which made them successful with my parents ! " 9 
(V, 11-12). 

As the three girls grow up, marriage is thought 
of, and suitors appear. " My eldest sister was 
courted by a charming young man ; I soon per- 
ceived that he was taking notice of me, and I 
guessed that presently my sister would be but 
a pretext for his attentions to me. I had a 
foreboding of the troubles that his preference 
might bring down upon me; and I told my 
mother about it" 10 (V, 12). Suzanne is re- 
warded for her disinterestedness by the an- 
nouncement that she must immediately go into a 
convent, and steps are taken to this effect. The 
estate is divided between her two sisters, who 
are soon married. Her mother's fear that she 
might some day question the right of that parti- 
tion and claim her legal share, thus associating 
a natural child with legitimate children, acts as 
a new and powerful incentive to get rid of her 
(V, 24, 27). 
These are the few traits in the character and 

9 Compare Clarissa Harlowe, the motives of her family *s 
enmity to her. 

10 Similarly Clarissa was preferred by Lovelace, who 
had come to woo her sister Arabella. 



364 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

the adventures of the Religieuse which strike 
us as obviously reminiscent of the novels of 
Eichardson. Presently Diderot frees himself 
from his model and starts to describe the ways 
of life in a convent, of which, as a Protestant, 
Sichardson knew little. 1 1 Diderot's philosophic 
moralizings are of a nature very distinct from 
the Puritanic cant of the English author; his 
remarks on religious life in general, on some 
forms of exalted piety or mystical "enthu- 
siasm" in particular, and on their effects on 
practical life and on minds lacking the monastic 
vocation, are as far as possible from Richard- 
son's vein ; as far indeed as the earnest feeling, 
for which the French philosopher finds an im- 
partial expression, of the state of bliss and sanc- 
tity to which some souls manage to attain in 
conventual retreats. It should also be men- 
tioned that, in spite of all the admiration which 
Diderot professed for Richardson's copiousness 
of details, there is little room for realistic trifles 
in La Religieuse: the work as a whole is short, 
the characters few in number, the narrative 
compact to a fault ; little is allowed even for the 
description of gestures, that part of fiction 
11 See in Grandison, the story of Clementina. 



THE NOVELIST 365 

which Diderot held to be often more eloquent 
than words. That very epistolary form which 
Kousseau was borrowing for his Nouvelle 
Hel&ise in the same year, 1760, that useful 
fiction by which a variety of correspondents 
describe themselves and one another and slowly 
evolve the main action, as it were, by a process 
of gradual adumbration, is discarded by Dide- 
rot, who adopts the simpler and more direct 
form of the memoir, in the manner of Marivaux 
and Prevost. 

One trait in La Religieuse, however, the 
most disagreeable perhaps to mention, may have 
been partly due to the influence of Eichardson : 
we mean the thorough description of indecent 
or revolting scenes, the kind of stuff which 
Prevost had not thought fit to print in his trans- 
lations of Richardson. It looks as if, in the 
earlier stages of the literature of " sentiment," 
mysterious connections were more openly and 
naively revealed between the traditional no- 
tions of sexual purity and certain forms of 
pruriency, between sentimental morality and 
an amazing fondness for improper descriptions 
which serve as texts to its preachings. 12 The 
"This attitude of the "virtuous Richardson,' • without 



366 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

preoccupation, nay, the obsession of the prob- 
lems of sex was as characteristic of Richardson 
as of Diderot, and their notions concerning 
womanly honor, virtue, purity, were substan- 
tially the same. Little justification can be 
found in their moral intentions for their prac- 
tice of describing in writing what is unmention- 
able in speech; because, if indeed their aim is 
ethical, and their novels are destined to " moral- 
ize" youthful readers, a good deal of expurgation 
is needed before their works are placed in the 
hands of " young persons of both sexes." When 

which his novels would be meaningless, stands in curious 
contrast with the attitude of another great English 
novelist, a professed enemy of the sentimentalists, who 
has denounced ' ' all these false sensations, peculiar to 
men, concerning the soiled purity of woman, the lost 
innocence, the brand of shame upon her, which are com- 
monly the foul sentimentalism of such as can be • too 
eager in the ehase of corruption when occasion suits, and 
are another side of pruriency, not absolutely foreign from 
the best of us in our youth. . . . ' ' " The young man who 
can look on them we call fallen women with a noble eye, 
is to my mind he that is most nobly begotten of the race, 
and likeliest to be the sire of a noble line" (George 
Meredith, Bhoda Fleming). 

Why, in the judgment of many critics, Diderot seems 
to, be credited, with the pruriency and Richardson with 
the purity of a sentimental period, it is difficult to 
determine. - 



THE NOVELIST 367 

realistic pictures of certain aspects of life are 
given with a view to instilling the principles of 
virtue in the hearts of young persons, as Rich- 
ardson would have said, the method employed 
is very likely to defeat the end; and the more 
power is applied to the descriptions in question, 
the more demoralizing the fiction may become. 
Should we accept the claim of all moral realists, 
that their intentions are irreproachable even 
when writing most repulsive, libidinous de- 
scriptions, their achievements in this line sup- 
ply one more proof of the radical difference, 
often amounting to incompatibility, between a 
moral and an artistic purpose in a work of lit- 
erature. Eealism may have a great deal of 
scientific, social, artistic value ; but it is a mis- 
take to try and make realistic imitation instru- 
mental for morality, for as the imitation be- 
comes more perfect, as the reader comes nearer 
nature itself, he drifts farther and farther away 
from ethical concerns. 

The trials of Pamela's and Clarissa's virtue, 
which by the way make the modern reader 
wonder how the poor creatures could still love 
their persecutors and entertain a wish to marry 
them, very probably had something to do with 



368 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

the writing of those infamous scenes in which 
the Beligieuse is the unconscious victim of 
attentats a la pudeur. One may of course ob- 
ject that Diderot had written more than one 
indecent page before, particularly in the Bijoux 
Indiscrets, which had nothing to do with Rich- 
ardson's influence. But between that early work 
of Diderot and his Beligieuse, there is all the 
difference which is found between a light 
and a serious work, between the inspiration of 
the Parnasse Satyrique and that of a master of 
realism, be he Richardson or Zola or Maupas- 
sant. In the same way, there is a strong anal- 
ogy between the death of the insane abbess and 
the agony of the woman Sinclair in Clarissa. 
The portrait of each of those horrible creatures 
shows " a possibility of character of which the 
healthy, the pure, the unthinking have never 
dreamed. Such a portrait is not art, that is 
true; but it is science, and that delivers the 
critic from the necessity of searching his vocab- 
ulary for the cheap superlatives of moral cen- 
sure." 13 Diderot is not free from a suspicion 
that he described the wicked and their courses 
with a little too much complacency; but Rich- 
13 J. Morley, Diderot . . ., vol. II, pp. 35-36. 



THE NOVELIST 369 

ardson is exactly in the same plight. Like 
good realists, they both thought that everything 
in nature could be made the object of literary 
description, and were tempted to lay a little 
stress on the things that had not been very gen- 
erally described before. Only, Diderot had too 
much sense to develop at great length the moral 
reflections suggested by his topic, and he knew 
how to avoid that painful insistency of the 
Puritan whose prolix commentary betrays an 
uncomfortable feeling that the purity of his in- 
tentions is more or less open to doubt. 

Had Diderot looked abroad for examples of 
mere gaillardise, he would have found plenty to 
satisfy him in the healthier spirit of unsenti- 
mental novelists like Fielding and Smollett. 
But he never wrote anything in their vein, prob- 
ably because he knew it well enough, and it 
would have led him straight back to Gil Bias. 
There was more novelty in the manner of 
Sterne, which invested improper jests, derived 
from a long and almost venerable literary tradi- 
tion, with an original style and a transparent 
veil of proper intentions and childish innocence. 
25 



370 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

We have seen 14 how Tristram Shandy was all 
the rage in Paris when Sterne went there in 
1763. Just as Pantagruelism, "which you 
know is a certain jollity of mind, pickled in 
the scorn of fortune," 15 had been the fashion 
two centuries or so before, when it was preached 
by the Cure of Meudon, so Shandyism now 
gained the hearts of French readers to " Yorick," 
the parson of Sutton and Stillington. What 
was Shandyism ? — Shandyism was la sensibilite, 
or sentiment, with everything that the word car- 
ried with Bichardson, that is, pity, goodness, 
benevolence, beneficence, a disposition to love 
all mankind and to fall in love with this or that 
individual when chance served, a blend of phi- 
lanthropy and amorousness, the whole "pickled" 
in that peculiar English form of "jollity of 
mind " which is called humor. The Shand- 
ean was full of sentiment and laughed at him- 
self for it; he dared make fun of the feeling 
which everyone had been taking seriously, but 
his. saving grace in the eyes of his contempo- 
raries was that he himself was a man of feeling ; 

"See Chapter II, Diderot's English friends. 
"Kabelais, "The Author's Prologue' ' to the Fourth 
Boole, Motteux transl. 



THE NOVELIST 371 

like Gargarutua on a memorable occasion, he 
wept with one eye and laughed with the other. 
The humor of Shandyism, besides, was not the 
fierce humor of a Swift, 16 or a Smollett, which 
until that day most Frenchmen had taken to be 
typical of that British variety of mirth, but an 
indirect, urbane, innocent-looking, "parson- 
ical " kind of wit, which constantly hinted enor- 
mous improprieties and at once reproved the 
reader for imagining wicked things. 

Walpole sneered at the infatuation of French 
readers for Tristram Shandy, while his Castle 
of Otranto, although translated into French, 
failed to become popular. If Eichardson was 
aware of his own success in France, one might 
almost imagine that, when he died in 1761, it 
was from a broken heart, because he had found 
a rival there in a writer whom he despised, 
Laurence Sterne. Sterne's popularity in France, 
which increased greatly after the publication of 

"Voltaire in his Lettres philosophiques had given as 
a specimen of "humour" Swift's Modest Proposal for 
preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from 
being a burden to their parents or country, and for 
making them beneficial to the public. Diderot in the 
Encyclopedic, article "Humour," uses the same illus- 
tration. 



372 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

the Sentimental Journey, was to last long after 
the close of the eighteenth century, as long as 
" sensibility," romantic egotism, and the fond- 
ness for eccentricity. 17 The Sentimental Jour- 
ney was translated first, in 1769, by Frenais; 
the more wearisome task of putting Tristram 
Shandy into French, begun by the same trans- 
lator (2 vols, 1776), was completed in 1785 in 
two separate translations, one by La Baume, the 
other by the Marquis de Bonnay. But the 
more cultured part of Parisian society had not 
waited for these translations to become ac- 
quainted with Sterne's works. Mile de Lespi- 
nasse, the Count de Bissy, Diderot were devoted 
Shandeans from the very first. Diderot in 
1773, on his return from Kussia, completed a 
curious book, entitled Jacques le Fataliste, 
which was published only in 1796 ; as this work 
is generally described as being in the manner 
of Sterne, let us now consider what it owed to 
the English humorist. 

17 Mr F. B. Barton, in the preface of his interesting 
Etude sur I 'influence de Laurence Sterne en France au 
dix-huitieme siecle (Doctorat d 'universite, Paris, 1911), 
counts seventy French editions of the Sentimental 
Journey, about twenty-five of Tristram, five or six of 
Sterne's complete works, and twenty of his miscellaneous 
works. 



THE NOVELIST 373 

There is, to our knowledge, no instance in 
comparative literature of an apparently more 
obvious "influence" than this, of Tristram 
Shandy on Jacques le Fataliste. It does not 
consist in general literary tendencies, or the 
application of common doctrines on art, or in 
reminiscences, as was the case for La Religieuse : 
Diderot himself calls it " plagiarism," to antici- 
pate the very worst that malevolent critics 
would not fail, and have not failed, trium- 
phantly to proclaim. The whole of the preamble 
of Jacques is borrowed from Tristram; 18 the 
method of narration is exceedingly discursive, 
full of interruptions and digressions; and, to- 
wards the end, Diderot in these words returns 
to the episode in Tristram from which he; had 
started : 

" Here is the second paragraph, copied from 
the life of Tristram Shandy, unless the conver- 
sation between Jacques the Fatalist and his 
master bei anterior to that work, and the Eev- 
erend Sterne be the plagiarist, which I do not 
believe, but it is out of a very particular regard 
for Mr Sterne, whom I except from most 
writers of his nation, among whom it is a rather 

18 Tristram Shandy, Book VIII, Chapt. 19-23 (Saints- 
bury edition, London, 1900, vol. Ill, pp. 142-151). 



374 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

frequent custom to rob and then to abuse us" 
(VI, 284). 

Diderot proceeds to recount as a conclusion 
how his Jacques, just like Corporal Trim, fell 
in love while his wound was being massaged. 
But it is curious to note that Sterne's gross in- 
tention, which was the key to the whole tale, 
and the double meaning involved in his reflec- 
tion that Trim's amour with the Beguine " con- 
tained in it the essence of all the love romances 
which ever have been wrote since the beginning 
of the world," were entirely missed by Diderot. 
Yet this is not surprising, for the roundabout 
style and the peculiar form of wit of Sterne (to 
say nothing of the material difficulty which 
Diderot had in understanding colloquial Eng- 
lish) were far from akin to Diderot's very plain 
speech. 

What then attracted or interested Diderot in 
Tristram? And why did he choose to begin 
and conclude his Jacques with passages quoted 
from that book ? The most natural assumption, 
which has been repeatedly made since the publi- 
cation of Jacques le Fataliste, 19 is, that he 

19 Assezat quote® (VI, 5) the earliest criticism of 
Jacques le Fataliste, from the Decade pMlosophique, 



THE NOVELIST 375 

meant to imitate the style and the humor of 
Sterne. It has also been suggested by Assezat 
(VI, 7) that Diderot intended to show how easy 
that manner of trifling was, and how the most 
intricate piece of fiction, in spite of Sterne's 
example, could after many wanderings be 
brought to some sort of conclusion. Again, 
that in Sterne's mode of composition, or rather 
in his lack of construction, he found a suitable 
framework to support a variety of short stories 
which he had among his petits papiers, narra- 
tive sketches written for his own and his friends' 
entertainment. 

Each of these conjectures seems plausible 
enough to the critical reader of Jacques le 
Fataliste. It has been pointed out that Dide- 
rot's imitation is not limited to the beginning 
and the end of his book, where it is more appar- 
ent, but runs more or less through the whole. 
He: not only follows Sterne's whimsical method 
of story-telling, and tries " most of his narrative 

where it is declared to be "a very feeble imitation of 
Tristram." F. B. Barton, Influence de Sterne, 1911, 
takes substantially the same position. We refer the 
reader to this last work (Chap. IV, p. 98) for a parallel 
between the original and the borrowed passages, which 
it would be too lengthy to make here anew. 



376 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

gymnastics/' 20 but he is rather haunted by 
reminiscences from Tristram. The amours of 
Jacques, and to a lesser degree those of his 
master, are the supposed thread of Ariadne in 
this labyrinth of narration, just as the amours 
of Uncle Toby, and incidentally those of Trim, 
were something like the main action in Tris- 
tram Shandy. Both Trim and Jacques have 
been soldiers, and therefore believe in fatalism, 
— "Military men are apt to be superstitious," 
Diderot remarks; both have been wounded in 
the knee, and this wound is the occasion for 
each of them to tell his master how he fell in 
love. The masters listen to their valets with 
benevolent kindness. Trim and Jacques both 
have a brother in Lisbon; Trim's brother is 
supposed to be groaning in the cells of the In- 
quisition, Jacques's brother meets his fate in 
the Lisbon earthquake. Masters and valets 
alike have habitual gestures or tics which are 
supposed to be characteristic. 21 As a whole, 

20 C. S. Baldwin, "The Literary Influence of Sterne in 
France," in Modern Language Assoc. Public., vol. XVII 
(New Series, X), Number 2, p. 227. 

21 Other reminiscences of analogies, -some of which are 
rather doubtful, are: the comparison of the soul with 
the grub becoming a butterfly (VI, 195) ; social char- 



THE NOVELIST 377 

however, the Sternian elements in Jacques re- 
main artificial. The two main characters do 
not live by any life of their own; like most of 
Diderot's other creations, they serve as mouth- 
pieces for their author. The general plan of 
the book, as far as there is one, is much better 
connected, the contents are more serious and 
philosophic, though less picturesque and humor- 
ous, than in Sterne's flighty masterpiece. Di- 
derot's trifling is less amusing and his thought 
more substantial. To sum up, as a modern 
critic has excellently put it, Diderot's imitation 
is not "of the tone, but of the method and 

acters likened to worn coins; the "bed of justice'* 
(p. 26) ; the sentimental effusions of the Master about 
his horse, and of the Hostess about her dog; Jacques's 
tearful disposition. Lastly, Diderot's mysterious riders, 
at least in the opening pages of the book, remind one 
of the puzzling rider with the long nose, out of Slawken- 
bergius, in Tristram Shandy. — As for those "narrative 
gymnastics" which consist in interruptions, alleged gaps 
in the manuscript, apostrophes to the reader, they were 
common in the less proper kinds of literature before the 
age of Sterne, when it was no longer possible to write 
coarse things plainly. See Bijoux Indiscrets, pp. 176, 
299, 336, etc., and in the Essay on Claudius and Nero 
(III, 74), apostrophes to "Monsieur Pabbe," as Yorick 
apostrophized "Madam" or his friend "Eugenius. " 



378 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

manner; only there is somewhat more method 
and much less manner." 22 

On the other hand, Jacques le Fataliste cer- 
tainly contains satirical intentions directed 
against novels of adventure, possibly, also against 
that nondescript of literature, Tristram Shandy, 
which so oddly jumbles together the elements 
of the obscene novel, the novel of adventure, the 
novel of character and manners, the essay, the 
sermon, and what not other ingredients. Just 
after setting out, Diderot remarks: "You see, 
reader, that I am in a fair way, and that it 
would only depend on me to keep you waiting 
one, two, three years for the story of the amours 
of Jacques. . . . What would prevent me from 
making his master get married ? from shipping 
Jacques off to the West Indies ? taking his mas- 
ter over there? bringing them both back to 
France on the same vessel ? How easy it is to 
write tales!" (VI, 11). All the possibilities, 
all the complications which a given situation 
might bring about are thus reviewed by Diderot, 
time and time again, as his story proceeds, to 
show how cheap he holds them : 23 it would have 

23 C. S. Baldwin, op. cit., p. 229. 
23 See VI, pp. 13, 21, 23, 43, etc. 



THE NOVELIST 379 

had "an infectious smell" of Prevost's Cleve- 
land; it would have been as artificial and easy- 
flowing a narrative as all the romans a tiroirs, 
Gil Bias, Tom Jones, Roderick Random, Can- 
dide, and a thousand more, in which incident 
follows on incident, apparently without end, 
until it pleases the author to stop. Diderot 
prefers a series of "true stories," anecdotes 
from life, such as those about Messrs Le Pelle- 
tier and Aubertot (p. 60), about Jacques's cap- 
tain and his friend (p. 68), about Gousse and 
Premontval (p. 70), about Suzon and the priest 
(p. 121), etc., the authenticity of which he 
vouches for and seems to consider as a great 
recommendation. Here, as in his plays, Dide- 
rot takes a pride in being a realist; he scorns 
the mere imaginative tale, he keeps repeating 
" Ceci n'est pas un conte," 24 he weaves real ad- 
ventures, " histories," in the loose fabric of his 
Jacques le Fataliste. In his eyes truth is much 
more valuable than fiction. " I do not care for 
novels, except for those of Richardson. I make 
a history; this history will please or will not 
please, that is the least of my concerns. My 

24 This is the title of his touching story of the unfor- 
tunate Mile de la Chaux. 



380 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

aim is to be true, I have attained it. ... I see 
that, with a little imagination and style, noth- 
ing is easier than to spin a novel" (VI, 239). 

Therefore it seems likely that, although the 
setting of Jacques is borrowed from Sterne, 
Diderot never intended to rival him, or to rank 
among novelists of any description whatsoever. 
He threw into a handy mould a farrago of anec- 
dotes, which are perfect in their way, each of 
them complete, and not at all so disconnected 
as the reader might have expected from an imi- 
tator of Sterne. His imitation of Sterne does 
not go deep ; it is a mere screen, a pretext, for 
the introduction of a large number of original 
developments. And this original part, which 
is the most important in the book, owes nothing 
whatever to Sterne's plots, characters, humor, 
or fanciful tricks of writing ; it is Diderot pure 
and simple. 

There is besides a philosophic part in the 
work, a discussion of Fatalism, which gives rise 
to all the reflections, paradoxes, syllogisms and 
logical absurdities which may result from a 
critical consideration of the Mohammedan Mek- 
toub, "It was written." Supposing a man — 
Jacques — who firmly believes, after Zeno, Mo- 



THE NOVELIST 381 

hammed, or Spinoza, that a strict necessity 
rules the world, that he cannot help his destiny, 
that all he thinks, does, and suffers was written 
down from eternity "in the big book above," 
no line of which can ever be changed, would not 
the adventures of such a man make an enter- 
taining conte philosophiquef 

Now, the great creator of the philosophic tale, 
Voltaire, had just published his Candide ou 
VOptimisme (1759) when Sterne began to 
write the first instalments of Tristram Shandy. 
Faint gleams of a philosophic purpose may be 
discerned in the opening chapters of Tristram, 
which its author placed under the patronage of 
the Moon, the " Bright Goddess " who>had made 
the world go mad after Cunegund and Candid. 25 
What is Sterne's pale hero but a victim of cir- 
cumstance, a wretch predestined from his ear- 
liest beginning, before even he was born, to odd 
misfortunes, and forever incapable of thinking 
or writing anything in an orderly, logical man- 
ner? The initial data of his psychological 
make-up, as they are found in the first chapters 

25 Tristram Shandy, Book I, Chap. 9 (Saintsbury edi- 
tion, p. 19). — On Candide, see M. Andre Morize's article 
in Revue du XVIIIe siecle (Jan.-March, 1913) ; also his 
critical edition of that work, Paris, 1913. 



382 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

of his history, lead one to expect a book entitled 
Tristram or Pessimism, a kind of pendant or 
counterpart of the wonderful Candide. How- 
ever, what eventually prevailed was not this 
philosophic purpose, but the element of oddity 
and topsy-turviness which was in the poor hero's 
nature; his congenital infirmity, that of hope^ 
lessly muddled " animal spirits," is to be taken 
as sufficiently accounting for the utter confu- 
sion of the succeeding instalments of his sup- 
posed autobiography. 

Diderot took up the task which Sterne, car- 
ried away by his subject, had willingly relin- 
quished. But Diderot could not write a novel 
on Pessimism. For Pessimism, that philo- 
sophic offspring of " spleen," had not yet risen 
to the dignity of a metaphysical system. There 
were Hoops, Tristrams, and other English pes- 
simists who proclaimed that "the worst thing 
was to exist," 26 who cursed "this scurvy and 
disastrous world of ours," "this vile, dirty 
planet," 27 but no Schopenhauer, no Hartmann 
had yet come to systematize this distressing be- 
lief, so that Diderot might make fun of it. 

™Lettres & Mile Volland, XVIII, 407. 
* Tristram Shandy, Book I, Chap. 5, (Saintsbury edi- 
tion, pp. 11-12). 



THE NOVELIST 383 

Fatalism, or scientific determinism, was a more 
ancient and familiar topic, in which many 
philosophic systems and religious sects were in- 
terested, and numberless vast questions, such as 
free-will, predestination, moral responsibility, 
were involved. Thus it is not at all improbable 
that Diderot conceived and began a literary 
illustration of Fatalism several years before he 
thought of associating anything from Sterne 
with his work. The pitiless determinism that 
ruled the destinies of Candide and his friends 
as well as the fortunes of the unhappy Tristram, 
found its exponent in Jacques, the Fatalist. 

A few facts seem to confirm the impression 
that both Jacques le Fataliste and Tristram 
Shandy were written partly under the influence 
of Voltaire's tale, and that Diderot's Jacques 
was intended as a satire on Spinozism, just as 
Candide had been composed against the philo- 
sophic optimism of Leibnitz. The idea of de- 
terminism reigned supreme throughout the 
pages of Candide: "There is no effect without 
a cause," says the hero, "everything is neces- 
sarily bound together, and arranged for the 
best" (Chap. III). The notion of the neces- 
sary concatenation of all events in nature and in 



384 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

a man's life, with a pessimistic instead of an 
optimistic clause subjoined to it, assumed in 
Tristram Shandy the aspect of a hopeless and 
unavoidable confusion ; it only came in to show 
how distressing such a notion makes the task of 
a story-teller who is anxious properly to refer 
each effect to its cause, and each fact in the 
present to its antecedent in the past. A much 
more consistent effort was made by Diderot to 
analyze the fatalistic belief, not in the light of 
optimism, or pessimism, but simply to show how 
what men call chance works in everyday life, 
how artificial is the representation of reality as 
imaginative novelists are wont to give it, and 
how true stories are not so apt as fictions to 
turn out exactly as we expected that they would. 
Diderot probably thought of Voltaire's Candide 
when he pointed out how easily he could at 
every step make his tale branch out in various 
directions, how he might, if he wished, carry his 
characters into the remotest parts of the globe 
at a moment's notice. What becomes for in- 
stance of Frere Jean, the brother of Jacques, 
after he has escaped with Frere Ange from the 
persecution of wicked monks? Like Candide, 
with Doctor Pangloss and that good Dutch Ana- 



THE NOVELIST 385 

baptist who was also called Jacques, the two 
monks went to Lisbon, " there to find an earth- 
quake, which could not take place without 
them." 28 There they also met their doom, " as 
it was written above," whereas Candide and 
Pangloss, as is well known, only escaped the 
earthquake to fall into the hands of the Inqui- 
sition. Now, Trim's worthy brother, having 
married a Jew's widow who sold sausages in 
Lisbon, was also a victim of the Inquisitors. 
Thus, of the two dreaded calamities which had 
overtaken Voltaire's pair of philosophic opti- 
mists in the capital of Portugal, Sterne natu- 
rally enough remembered the catastrophe which 
vividly illustrated the intolerant and persecut- 
ing spirit of "Popery," a subject on which he 
could outdo Voltaire in warmth of denuncia- 
tion; while Diderot chose the earthquake inci- 
dent as being more to his purpose. Lastly, it 
may be noted that there is some analogy between 
Diderot's "true story" of the indigent poet 
whom he sent to Pondicherry so that he might 

28 The Lisbon earthquake happened in 1756. Voltaire's 
Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne (1758) discussed the 
notion of Providence and the tenets of Optimism sup- 
ported by Shaftesbury, Leibnitz, and Pope. 
26 



386 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

get rich quickly and afford to write bad poetry 
afterwards, and Voltaire's satire entitled Le 
Pauvre Diable, which was published in 1758. 
To conclude, it seems very possible that the 
first outline of Jacques le Fataliste may have 
been written as early as 1760 ; it was then in- 
tended as a philosophic story after Voltaire's 
model, on the subject of determinism or fatal- 
ism. Diderot's contributions to the Encyclo- 
pedic on Zeno and the Stoics, Spinoza, Leibnitz, 
and other determinists, which he had completed 
before this time, supplied the philosophic ma- 
terial in abundance. Happening then to read 
Tristram Shandy, he paid much more attention 
to the manner in which it illustrated the vagaries 
of chance than to its style and humor, the origi- 
nality of which he could not very well perceive. 
The episode of Trim's wound and his love, and 
the fatalistic saying of Trim's captain, that 
"each bullet has its billet," served as centers 
around which all the rest crystallized. Diderot 
discarded Sterne's typographical oddities; he 
made a weak attempt to characterize his heroes 
by habitual gestures ; he proved more methodical 
in the management of his narrative eccentrici- 
ties, less discursive and digressive, and alto- 



THE NOVELIST 387 

gether careless of saving proprieties by the use 
of innuendoes. In a sort of frame plastered up 
at both ends with two fragments from Sterne, 
he threw in confusedly, helter skelter, not only 
the arguments of fatalism, but also a collection 
of true anecdotes and short stories which owed 
nothing whatever to the English humorist, 
either in matter or in tone. The result is 
Jacques le Fataliste as we know it: a work of 
mosaic, a very composite novel, written in a 
free, conversational style, very different from 
Sterne's artistic style, a dialogue enlivened every 
now and then by elaborate philosophical, critical, 
and narrative passages. It is in some respects 
unfortunate that Jacques le Fataliste should 
almost always recall Sterne and Eabelais to the 
critic's mind ; for all comparisons between those 
great masters of Humor and a philosopher who 
sadly lacked humor are bound to bring scorn 
upon his work. But, considered as an essen- 
tially Diderotian piece, which it is even in that 
love for digressions which has been ascribed to 
Sterne's influence, it is full of power, and de- 
serves the eulogy which Goethe gave it, after 
reading it in manuscript, in 1780 : " It is really 
first-rate — a very fine and exquisite meal, pre- 



388 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

pared and dished up with great skill." 29 Goethe 
says that he enjoyed the whole meal; but other 
critics may pass some of the courses. 

It has been asserted that Sterne's influence 
made Diderot conscious of the resources which 
he could find in the description of gestures to 
make his stories more real and give a more con- 
crete vision of his characters. 30 Sterne, accord- 
ing to this theory, taught Diderot the value of 
this important part of the narrative art, and is 
to some extent responsible for the progress made 
by Diderot between La, Religieuse, in 1760, and 
such tales as the Neveu de Rameau, the Conver- 
sation oVun pere avec ses enfants, and Ceci nest 
pas un conte, all written after 1770. This seems 
a little difficult to admit. Sterne had touched 
Diderot too lightly to affect his style in any 
lasting manner. !N"o glowing eulogy of Sterne 
is to be found anywhere in the works of Diderot ; 
he does not even quote him once as a master of 
that great art of pantomime on which so much 
stress had been laid, not only in the disserta* 
tions on the Fils Naturel and the Pere de 

29 Quoted by J. Morley, Diderot . . . , vol. II, p. 38. 

30 F. B. Barton, L 'Influence de Sterne, Chapitre IV, 
end. 



THE NOVELIST 389 

famille, which had appeared before Sterne be- 
came famous, but in the Paradoxe sur le come- 
dien, of 1773. Diderot would surely have 
acknowledged in 1773 what he owed to Sterne, 
if he had learnt from him the secrets of such a 
valuable art as that of descriptive pantomime. 
For this he admires no other master beside 
Eichardson. 

Neither Eichardson nor Sterne, however, ap- 
pear to have left any trace in Diderot's other 
works of fiction, or rather narration, since he 
prided himself on always writing from facts. 
A philosophical conception generally dominates 
these pieces : a criticism of common morality in 
Rameaus Nephew, that wonderful picture of 
a Bohemian who is a great musician, a parasite, 
a buffoon, and a kind of Zarathoustra all in one ; 
— some interesting cases of moral casuistry, ex- 
pounded by Diderot's worthy father talking 
with his children around the fire in their home 
at Langres; 31 — the cruelty of people who love 
no more and are still loved, in the lamentable 
true story of Mile de la Chaux ; — a return to the 
criticism of common morality, but this time 

31 Entretien d 'un pere avec ses enfants. 



390 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

limited to the question of sex only, in the Sup- 
plement au Voyage de Bougainville. 

Bougainville in 1771 had related the voyage 
of circumnavigation which he had accomplished, 
by the King's order, between 1766 and 1769, on 
the frigate La Boudeuse escorted by the trans- 
port L'Etoile. 32 In his preface, Bougainville 

32 Louis- Antoine do Bougainville, Voyage autour du 
monde, par la frigate du roi La Boudeuse et la flutei 
L'Etotte, en 1766, 1767, 1768, et 1769, Paris, 1771, 1 
vol. 4to. — This was translated into English by John 
Reinhold Forster, Dublin, 1772, 8vo. 

In 1771 John Hawkesworth, thanks to his friend Gar- 
rick, was appointed by Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the 
Admiralty, to publish an account of the English ex- 
plorations in the South Seas: this appeared in 1773, in 
3 vols 4to, as An Account of the Voyages undertaken by 
the order of His present Majesty for making discoveries 
in the Southern Hemisphere, and successfully performed 
by Commodore Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain Carteret, 
and Captain Cook, in the Dolphin, the Swallow, and the 
Endeavour. As a consequence of this editorial work 
Hawkesworth was so harassed by critics that he died in 
the same year. 

Bougainville 's Account deals with the moral notions of 
the Tahitians on p. 197; he also spoke of the wHIFe 
woman disguised, named Bare, p. 254, and of a noble old 
Tahitian who seemed to foretell dire catastrophes to his 
countrymen from the coming of white men, p. 192. 
Diderot adds much to these few data, partly, as it seems, 



THE NOVELIST 391 

reviewed the thirteen voyages around the world 
which had preceded his own, from Magellan's in 
1519 down to the more recent English expedi- 
tions by Anson (1740-1744), Byron (1764), 
Wallis and Carteret (1766-1769). Wallis had 
preceded him in Tahiti by a very short time, 
and Cook was on his way there (1768-1771) 
before the French navigator had returned home. 
Diderot was greatly interested in Bougainville's 
relation of his voyage, and he possibly read also 
the collection of Voyages which John Hawkes- 
worth published in 1773, for the English gov- 
ernment, from the accounts of the English ex- 
plorers. But it was not as a geographer, nor as 
a political economist considering the possibili- 
ties of future economic expansion for his coun- 
try, that Diderot read and admired these won- 
derful stories of traffics and discoveries: the 
philosopher found an occasion to moralize in the 

from Hawkesworth and the discussions in the Annual 
Begister and the Gentleman's Magazine concerning the 
immorality of the Tahitians. Bougainville charges 
Wallis 's companions with having brought a contagious 
disease into the islands; Cook (in Hawkesworth, vol. Ill, 
p. 82) returns the charge against Bougainville; but 
Wallis 's attempt to vindicate himself (Hawkesworth, 
vol. I, p. 324) had conclusively proved the case against 
his own expedition. 



392 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

consequences of the arrival of white men among 
happy savages, and, in the consideration of the 
religious and moral ideas of those islanders, an 
excellent starting-point to study critically, as 
Montaigne had done in his chapter On Canni- 
bals, the foundations of natural religion and 
natural ethics. 

As usual, this sort of conte philosophique 
runs at once into the form of a dialogue; this 
introduces the fictitious Supplement to Bougain- 
ville's hook, an ingenious fabrication in the 
manner of Saunderson's dying speech; and the 
Supplement in its turn is a dialogue, between 
a good Tahitian and the Catholic priest who 
ministered to the spiritual needs of the two 
French ships, — Bougainville tells us that his 
name was La Veze. The total absence of mod- 
esty by which Wallis, Bougainville, and Cook 
had been struck on arriving in Tahiti, the shame- 
less and apparently naive libidinous habits of 
the natives which greatly excited the interest of 
the contemporary reviewers and readers, be- 
came with Diderot a theme for prolonged dis- 
cussions between the Abbe and Orou concerning 
morality, propriety, marriage, religious institu- 



THE NOVELIST 393 

tions, and the celibacy of priests. There is no 
need to enter with them into the discussion of 
the old sceptical theme concerning the relativity 
of human ideas, nor of the belief cherished by 
Diderot and the school of Shaftesbury, and 
seemingly confirmed by the kindly disposition 
of the Tahitians, that human nature was good. 
It suffices that the Supplement, as well as Di- 
derot's previous attempts at novel-writing, points 
to the conclusion that the good philosopher was 
not any more gifted for the novel than for the 
drama, because his personality insisted on ob- 
truding itself in everything he wrote. In spite 
of his wish to be objective and to follow reality 
faithfully, he appeared in his own person every- 
where, as a dogmatic or a critical moralist. He 
started indeed from some ground of reality, gen- 
erally borrowed from his experience or his 
reading; but he at once rose to philosophic 
generalization, and then his rationalistic ego 
prevailed, together with his unconquerable fond- 
ness for intellectual analysis, in the light of 
which the most respected systems were speedily 
undermined. The philosophic tale, an emi- 
nently French genre, in which Eenan was to 



394 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

excel after Voltaire, was, much more truly than 
either Kichardson's or Sterne's novels, the kind 
of fiction for which Diderot was best fitted, and 
in which " it was written " that he should leave 
his mark. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE CEITIO 

" Surd qui cogitationum vertigine delectantur, 
ac pro servitute habent fide fixa out axiomatis 
constantibus constringi" With these words, 
from Bacon, a great French critic once charac- 
terized Diderot. 1 Although this sentence is 
meant, both by its author and the writer who 
quoted him, to convey a good deal of blame, it 
may well be asked whether it does not sound a 
little like praise when applied to a philosopher. 
Diderot certainly would have felt rather flattered 
than grieved by a description of him which 
placed him in the same class with his masters 
Montaigne and Bayle. " As for me," he frankly 
wrote one day, "I concern myself more with 
forming than with dissipating clouds, with sus- 
pending judgments than with judging" (I, 
369) ; and, in his Refutation of Helvetius: "I 
do not decide, I ask questions " (II, 388). This 
independence from preconceived principles, this 

1 F. Brunetiere, Manuel de Vhist. de la litt. frang., 1st 
edition, 1898, p. 314. 



396 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

scepticism which delights in the free examina- 
tion of ideas and in the exercise of thought for 
its own sake, is to be borne in mind when at- 
tempting to define Diderot's position in criti- 
cism. " I do not like Diderot very much," said 
Brunetiere, " and one of the reasons I have for 
not liking him is, that after reading his works 
over more than once I am still and always in 
doubt as to what he was." 2 It is probable that 
the more dogmatic intellect of the evolutionistic 
critic failed to understand Diderot sympathet- 
ically for the very reason that Diderot had above 
all avoided being bound "by a fixed faith and 
constant axioms." It is both easier and safer to 
trace the history — or, to use the modern term, 
the evolution — of Diderot's critical ideas, as one 
should do for all his ideas, than to try and state 
them in some complete and systematic whole. 

Several times indeed, and in several fields of 
inquiry, he had attempted to fix his thought in 
its essential forms, to reach some solid founda- 
tions for his beliefs. In ethics, he had followed 
Shaftesbury, only to find in the end that he 
could uot possibly prove his inmost persuasion, 

2 F. Brunetiere, L' evolution des genres, 2d edition, 
1892, p. 153. 



THE CRITIC 397 

that a good, virtuous life was the best. He had 
sincerely believed, with Richardson, in sexual 
morality, and yet had found, in the peculiar 
notions entertained on this subject in Tahiti, a 
proof of " the inconvenience there is in attach- 
ing moral ideas to certain physical actions which 
do not admit of any." He had not only 
preached, but lived up to, a gospel of benevo- 
lence and philanthropy, and, on the other hand, 
denied all merit, virtue and moral responsibility 
with Jacques the Fatalist, and depicted in 
Rameau's nephew a sort of Metzschean avard la 
tettre, who deliberately lived " beyond good and 
evil" and professed a distressingly plausible 
creed of selfishness and immorality. In sci- 
ence, he had shown a truly Baconian contempt 
for builders of systems, he had commended facts 
and experiments above everything else, and then 
left his record in the history of scientific thought 
mainly as a forerunner of Evolutionism, the 
most far-reaching system of modern times. In 
dramatic literature, he had elaborately laid 
down a new body of rules, concluding however 
with these words : " Remember that there is not 
one of these rules which genius cannot success- 
fully infringe." — Who could expect such a 



398 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

thinker to adhere throughout his life to a creed 
in criticism, especially at a time when old tenets 
were being revised or overthrown, when Classi- 
cism was on the wane and Eomanticism was 
dawning ? 

Diderot's critical ideas concerning dramatic 
literature have already been considered. Al- 
though they constitute the most elaborate and 
coherent part of his work as a critic, that also 
by which he was best known in his lifetime and 
through which perhaps he exerted the widest 
influence, yet they are dependent on a higher, 
more general system of criticism, which he never 
was able to grasp fully and expound as a whole. 
This system may be deduced from his theo- 
retical discussion on "the Beautiful" in the 
Encyclopedic, from passages in the Letter on 
the Deaf and Dumb and the Literary Miscel- 
lanies, and from the reports, entitled Salons, 
which he wrote for Grimm's Correspondance 
litteraire on the art exhibitions held in Paris 
every other year after 1751. 

As for the particular question of the English 
influence on Diderot in general criticism, in art 
criticism, and in the criticism of poetry, it is 
much less simple than the questions studied in 



THE CRITIC 399 

the preceding chapters, concerning his indebted- 
ness to English philosophy and science, or to the 
dramatists and novelists of England. In mat- 
ters of poetics and esthetics, France had for 
about a century laid down the classical canons 
which English writers and critics had more or 
less reluctantly followed. The " noble freedom " 
of the English, when displayed in literature, met 
with much less appreciation among the French 
than when it exerted itself in politics, in science, 
in philosophy and in divinity. And on the other 
hand it looked as if the more polite English 
writers, ever since 1660, had been ashamed of 
their national literary tradition, and more eager 
than even the French to place themselves under 
the authority of Boileau, Bouhours, Rapin, Le 
Bossu, or Du Bos. Diderot therefore, while he 
felt greatly interested by the independent spirit 
which began to reassert itself in English poetry 
towards the middle of the eighteenth century, 
might very well believe that in a general way 
the truth in esthetics was still on the side of 
the French neo-classical tradition. 

Besides, esthetic problems were no. longer so 
simple as they had been in the preceding cen- 
tury. From the domain of literature they had 



400 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

been extended to all the other arts. The ques- 
tion no longer was, for instance, as in the early 
seventeenth century, which should prevail, popu- 
lar and romantic forms or the learned and clas- 
sical models ; nor was it, as in the latter part of 
the reign of Louis XIV, whether the Ancients 
or the Moderns had reached the highest point 
of literary perfection in all kinds. But critics, 
following up a traditional misconception of a 
misquoted passage of Horace, Ut pictura poesis* 
had sought to define those philosophic concepts 
which underlie all artistic activity, — Art, the 
Beautiful, and Nature. From the moment 
when criticism had ceased to be merely literary 
and had carried its inquiries into all the fields 
of art, general esthetic criticism had appeared, 
the philosophy of the Beautiful had been born. 
It is not possible to assign a precise date to 
this important fact of the generalization of 
criticism, which gave rise to esthetics. In 
France, the granting of royal patronage to the 
fine arts under the reign of Louis XIV had in a 
manner interested the learned in the essence and 

3 See an interesting paper on this subject, by Mr W. 
G. Howard, in Modern Lang. Assoc. Publications, 1909, 
vol. XXIV (New Series, vol. XVII), pp. 40-124. 



THE CRITIC 401 

principles of other arts besides literature; later 
on, the wider popularity which painting, sculp- 
ture, architecture and all the liberal arts had 
gained during the regency and the reign of 
Louis XV, when their patrons were found in 
greater numbers in town than at court, made 
their concerns a common topic for all polite con- 
versations. In England, meanwhile, artistic 
preoccupations had begun to be considered an 
essential part of a gentlemanly education, and 
amateurs, connoisseurs or "virtuosi "had become 
legion. Thus it is that, long before Diderot, 
both in England and France, a close alliance 
had been established between literary criticism 
and art criticism ; and, in attempts to outline a 
philosophy of the Beautiful, the ideals of arts 
which differed in purpose and means of expres- 
sion had been more and more combined, amalga- 
mated, and often hopelessly confused. 4 

Among the most celebrated virtuosi in the 
reign of Queen Anne was Shaftesbury, the phi- 
losopher whose system of ethics had fired Di- 

4 On the origin and development of this confusion be- 
tween artistic ideals, see the preface of Lessing's Laocoon, 
and for a fuller and more critical account Prof. Irving 
Babbitt's New Laolcoon, Chap. I. 
27 



402 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

derot with enthusiasm. His principles of 
esthetics were intimately connected with his 
ethical theories. For him there was more than 
an analogy, there was almost an identity between 
morality and art. Both were conceived by him 
as originating in a kind of natural taste, an 
innate faculty of discerning between good and 
evil, beauty and ugliness. The Beautiful and 
the Good, according to him, were intuitively 
felt, immediately recognized, by a kind of in- 
stinct proper to all generous, unsophisticated 
souls. Beauty referred to things; morality to 
actions and characters. Shaftesbury did not go 
further, he refused to analyze those innate no- 
tions of the Good and the Beautiful. For him, 
they shone by their own splendor, they were as 
clear and distinct as any "first principles" in 
Descartes; for a criterion, which might have 
afforded the basis for a more satisfactory defini- 
tion, the author of the Characteristics gave 
nothing but a rather vague " harmony." 5 

This uncritical attitude was maintained and 
in a way exaggerated by Shaftesbury's disciple, 

5 Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the eighteenth 
century, vol. II, pp. 26, 31-32. Also Thomas Fowler, 
Shaftesbury and Eutcheson, pp. 67-70, and 126 ff. 



THE CEITIC 403 

Hutcheson, in his Inquiry concerning Beauty, 
Order, Harmony, and Design (1725). 6 With 
Hutcheson, the metaphors of Shaftesbury be- 
came philosophic entities: the "moral sense" 
and the "esthetic sense" were spoken of as 
though they had been as real as the sense of 
sight or the sense of hearing. — Crousaz, in his 
Traite du Beau (1715) had enumerated the 
kinds of the Beautiful rather than defined its 
nature. — The Jesuit Father Andre, whose Essai 
sur le Beau (1741) also gave a full descrip- 
tion of the concrete forms of the Beautiful, fol- 
lowed Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in assigning 
a character of Cartesian evidence to the percep- 
tion of beauty. 

On the more particular subject of the rela- 
tions between the different arts, the Abbe Du 

8 This was one of two treatises by Hutcheson which 
appeared in 1725. They were translated into French by 
Eidous, one of Diderot's assistants in the translation of 
James's Dictionary, under this title: Becherches sur 
I'origine des idees que nous avons de la Beaute et de la 
Vertu, en deux traites : le Premier, sur la Beaute, I 'Ordre, 
I'Earmonie et le Dessein; le Second, sur le Bien et le 
Mai Physique et Moral; from the 4th English edition; 
2 vols, Amsterdam, 1749. Diderot, while disagreeing 
with Hutcheson, strongly recommends the perusal of his 
work, "especially in the original' ' (X, 17). 



404 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Bos had written some Reflexions critiques sur la 
poesie etla peinture which were widely read and 
ran through six editions between 1719 and 1765 ; 
and the Abbe Batteux, in 1746, had concluded an 
era of long and unfruitful discussions concern- 
ing the principles of esthetics, with his Beaux- 
Arts reduits a un meme principe, — a title which 
is descriptive of the aim pursued by all esthetic 
critics up to 1750. The common principle to 
which all arts were reduced was " the imitation 
of beautiful nature," — a baffling definition, as 
Diderot justly remarked, when the question was 
to define la belle nature itself. 

We need not enter into Diderot's discussion, 
in his article "Beau," 7 of the results attained 
by his predecessors. His account of Plato's and 
Augustine's theories of the Beautiful, which he 
copied from Father Andre, was followed by a 
critical examination of the systems of Wolf, 
Crousaz, Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, Batteux, and 
Andre. To this last he gave the preference. 
But he brought his efforts more or less success- 

7 Printed separately as Becherches philosophiques sur 
I'origine et la nature du Beau (1751), as a specimen of 
the Encyclopedic ; and thus reprinted in the Amsterdam 
edition (1773), also by Naigeon, and by Assezat (vol. X). 



THE CRITIC 405 

fully to bear upon the question of the origin, 
the formation of the concept of Beauty. He 
would not see in it an innate idea, reflecting 
some transcendent essence supposed to exist ob- 
jectively in the Platonic world of ideas. Truer 
to the principles of. Locke than Locke's own 
disciple, Shaftesbury, he reduced the notion of 
the Beautiful to sensations accumulated and 
generalized; he defined the esthetic feeling by 
the perception of relations, and then attempted 
to confirm and to complete his definition by 
bringing all the various kinds of beauty within 
the scope of his rather abstract formula. 

This abstract character prevented his theory 
from becoming widely accepted. To most crit- 
ics it has seemed that his earnest effort to deter- 
mine the nature of the Beautiful philosophically 
had resulted in a vague, narrowly intellectual, 
and altogether unsatisfactory definition. This 
may not appear quite fair, if one will but follow 
Diderot's explanation and see whether his mean- 
ing is not clearer and deeper than one is in- 
clined to think at first sight : 

" When I say, whatever calls up in our minds 
the idea of relations, I do not mean that we 
must, in order to call a thing beautiful, appre- 



406 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

ciate what kind of relations reign in it; I do 
not require that the man who sees a piece of 
architecture should he able to state, what even 
the architect may not know, that this part is to 
that other part as such a number is to such 
another number; I do not require that the man 
who hears a concert should know, when some- 
times the musician is ignorant of it, that this 
sound stands to this other sound in the relation 
of two to four, or four to five. It suffices that he 
should perceive and feel that the parts of that 
architecture, the sounds of that musical piece, 
have some relations either between themselves 
or with other objects. It is the inde termination 
of these relations, the ease with which they are 
perceived, and the pleasure which attends their 
perception, that have caused men to imagine 
that the beautiful was a matter of feeling rather 
than of reason." 

Kderot here appears in his usual role of de- 
stroyer of artificial distinctions : the " faculties " 
of the soul, just as the "kingdoms" of nature, 
and the "genres" of literature, are convenient 
categories, but should not be mistaken for reali- 
ties existing independently and separated from 
one another by hard and fast partitions. Having 
thus shown that there is a large intellectual ele- 
ment in the feelings of esthetic pleasure, espe- 
cially in those of a higher grade, he goes on to 



THE CEITIC 407 

apply his theory to all the so-called " innate " 
ideas or principles, reducing them likewise to 
an empiric source: 

" I dare assert that, whenever a principle has 
been familiar to us from early childhood, and 
whenever through habit we apply it easily and 
immediately to external objects, we believe that 
we judge concerning such objects through senti- 
ment ; but we are compelled to confess our error 
in all the cases where the complication of the 
relations and the novelty of the object suspend 
the application of the principle : then the pleas- 
ure must wait, before it is felt, until the under- 
standing has decided that the object is beauti- 
ful " (X, 29). 

In other words, the esthetic feeling, accord- 
ing to Diderot, resolves itself into two classes 
of elements: first, the unconscious or subcon- 
scious perception of some mathematical rela- 
tions existing between certain lines, or colors, 
or sounds; secondly, the associations which in 
our minds are connected with those harmonies 
of lines, colors, or sounds. His theory, though 
perhaps it affected a little too much empiricism, 
was remarkable in that it sought a subjective 
instead of an objective explanation of the es- 
thetic judgment. His early work in acoustics, 



408 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

and his later Elements d'harmonie, published 
under the name of the musician Bemetzrieder, 
sufficiently prove that he knew a great deal 
about the physical causes of musical pleasure, 
while his Essai sur la peinture shows a great 
degree of familiarity with the technique of 
color and design. As for the associations which 
so largely contribute to the true appreciation of 
artistic works of every kind, the suggestiveness 
which enhances the pleasure of harmonies per- 
ceived by the organs of sense, the whole body of 
Diderot's art criticism witnesses that he never 
lost sight of it. 

Unfortunately, after outlining this funda- 
mentally sound theory of the esthetic emotions, 
in reaction against his English and French 
predecessors, he allowed some other notions to 
interfere with it which were irrelevant and 
hardly reconcilable with empiricism. Foremost 
among these stands the ethical idea. 

Under Shaftesbury's influence, later strength- 
ened by the precepts and examples of Richard- 
son and Lillo, Diderot early became a staunch 
defender of the notion that art and ethics are 
intimately connected in their nature and their 
purpose, and that the main function of the 



THE CRITIC 409 

former should be to fortify or popularize the 
latter. This was a very ancient claim, which 
artists had put forth, as it were in their own 
defence, almost from the earliest beginnings of 
the arts. The eighteenth century was not a 
time in which such a claim could be contro- 
verted or ignored. It would have been not only 
foolhardy and dangerous, but contrary to the 
whole spirit of a sentimental age to suggest that 
art might be independent of morality. Thus 
it is that from the outset Diderot advocated the 
idea that art should be moral or not be at all ; 
all its suggestions, all esthetic pleasures should 
tend to " sow the seeds of virtue in our hearts," 
or "afford topics for moral discussions," like 
the novels of Richardson. 

"Every work of sculpture or painting must 
be the expression of some great maxim, a lesson 
for the spectator." — "Two qualities are essen- 
tial for the artist, morality and perspective." — 
"I am not a capuchin; yet I confess that I 
would willingly sacrifice the pleasure of seeing 
beautiful nude figures, if I could hasten the 
coming of the day when painting and sculpture, 
more decent and moral, would think of contrib- 
uting, together with the other arts, to inspire 
virtue and purify our manners" (XII, 83, 84). 



410 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

It was not so much the nude as the deshabille 
with which Diderot had a quarrel ; and in this 
he represented an important movement which 
was taking place in the evolution of French 
taste after 1750. The advent of sensibility 
and the progress of philosophy were gradually 
driving out of public favor the amiable levity, 
the delightfully artificial art of the disciples 
of Watteau. In condemning the pastorals of 
Boucher he stood not only for morality, but for 
the new tendency of public opinion which called 
for more truth and nature in painting as in the 
other arts. There was much in the realism of 
Chardin and in the wonderfully lifelike por- 
traits of La Tour that appealed to him ; but his 
ideal was best realized by Greuze, as is shown 
by his enthusiastic praises of everything he pro- 
duced: humble settings, familiar scenes, the 
faithful imitation of natural objects, pathetic 
intentions, all the elements that go to the mak- 
ing of a "popular" piece were actually to be 
found in each of the pictures of Greuze ; as Di- 
derot had meant to put them, and thought that 
he had put them, in his own plays. 

Would he have admired the peinture morale 
of Hogarth as well, had he been acquainted with 



THE CRITIC 411 

it? An eminent English critic has rightly 
judged that, despite the moralizing aim of Ho- 
garth, Diderot would have looked upon his 
works with feelings akin to horror. 8 Hogarth 
indeed is essentially satirical, and Diderot hated 
satire. There is no trace in the English artist 
of that gentle commiseration, that noble gift of 
human sympathy which, though it may easily 
turn into namby-pamby sentiment, is not a fea- 
ture for which a Diderot or a Greuze need 
blush. 

But Diderot knew nothing of English art. 
He wrote in his Salon of 1761: 

" They no longer paint in Flanders. If there 
are any painters in Italy and Germany, they 
are more scattered, they have less emulation and 
encouragement than ours. France then is the 
only country where this art is still maintained, 
and even with no small degree of glory" (X, 
151). 

And again, in 1765 : 

"lam much mistaken, or the French school, 
the only one still extant, is still far from its 
decline " (X, 237). 
8 J. Morley, Diderot . . ., vol. II, p. 59. 



412 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

However, lie read at least three contemporary 
English works of art criticism, and this reading 
suggested some of his own critical ideas. Ho- 
garth's odd production entitled The Analysis 
of Beauty? Webb's Inquiry into the Beauties 
of Painting, 10 and Spence's Poly metis 11 ex- 
erted on him that kind of influence which we 

9 W. Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, written with a 
view of fixing the fluctuating Ideas of Taste (1753) 
rather puzzled the contemporaries. Its purpose was to 
substitute the criticism of an artist for that of men of 
letters in matters of art, and to this end gave a com- 
mentary on an "oracle" of Lamozzo concerning Michael 
Angelo: this was mainly a discussion of the respective 
merits of straight and curved lines in art, and concluded 
by symbolizing the ideal of beauty under the guise of a 
certain curve enclosed in a pyramid of glass. This queer 
figure served as a frontispiece to the book. 

10 Daniel Webb, An Inquiry into the Beauties of Faint- 
ing, and into the merits of the most celebrated painters, 
ancient and modern (1760) ; dedicated to Spence; re- 
printed in Webb's Miscellanies, 1802. 

n Joseph Spence, Polymetis, or an Enquiry concerning 
the agreement between the works of the Boman poets and 
the remains of the ancient artists, being an attempt to 
illustrate them mutually from one another (1747) ; a 
series of 21 dialogues. It is well known that Winekel- 
mann's similar study of the beauties of ancient poetry 
and of the plastic arts, Von der Nachahmung der griechi- 
schen Werke in der Malerei und BildhauerTcunst (1756), 
to which Diderot alludes in his Salon of 1765 (X, 417), 
was the starting-point of Lessing's Laocoon. 



\ 



THE CRITIC 413 

have already had occasion to note, and which is 
characteristic of almost all the influences which 
Diderot underwent : they made him think, react, 
and evolve some theories of his own. 

He read Webb's Inquiry in a manuscript 
translation 12 and wrote a review of it in 1763. 
He found it "full of sense, wit, taste, and 
knowledge, not devoid of finesse and grace 
. . ., a work quite a la francaise" While he 
agreed with its author regarding the kind of 
artistic knowledge which should be sought after 
by true virtuosi or connoisseurs, he was sadly 
grieved by two things: Webb's neglect of 
French painters in his enumeration of the mas- 
ters to be studied, and his bold statement that 
scenes from the history of Christianity could 
not compare with mythological subjects for ar- 
tistic treatment. 

For the first of these offences, both Webb and 
Hogarth were sharply rebuked in Diderot's 
Salon of 1765, in the course of a eulogy of 
Chardin : 

"This man (Chardin) is the foremost col- 
orist in the Salon, and maybe one of the great- 

^Extrait d'un ouvrage anglais sur la peinture (XIII, 
33). The translation, by B . . . (Bergier) appeared in 
1765, as Becherches sur les leautes de la peinture. 



414 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

est colorists in the whole art of painting. I 
cannot forgive that impertinent Webb for hav- 
ing written a treatise on art without mentioning 
one single Frenchman. ISTor do I forgive Ho- 
garth either for having said that the French 
school has not even one mediocre colorist ! There 
you lied, Mr Hogarth ! It is either ignorance or 
platitude on your part. I know full well that 
your nation has a trick of disdaining an im- 
partial writer who dares to speak of us with 
praise ; but must you basely court your country- 
men at the expense of the truth ? Paint better, 
paint better, if you can. Learn how to sketch, 
and do not write. We and the English have 
two opposite manias. Ours is to overpraise 
English productions; theirs is to underrate our 
own. Hogarth was still living two years ago. 
He had sojorned in France; and for the last 
thirty years Chardin has been a great color- 
ist" 13 (X, 303). 

These are but petty quarrels of national 

amour-propre. The question of the artistic 

value of Christian subjects was of more im- 

13 Elsewhere (XI, 349) Diderot refers to Hogarth's 
Analysis and the curious sketches which it contained. 
Of a certain ugly bust by Le Moyne he says: "Do you 
know a book by Hogarth entitled the Line {Analysis) 
of Beauty? It is one of the queer figures in that 
work." — See also below (p. 426) the illustration of the 
Antinous and the dancing-master. 



THE CEITIC 415 

portance, and was one which could well divide 
English and French critics. The English en- 
tertained at that time (and possibly still enter- 
tain to some degree) the neo-classical and some- 
what Jansenistic idea which, in spite of the 
examples of Corneille and Kacine, Boileau had 
expressed in his Art Poetique: "The awful 
mysteries of the Christian faith are not sus- 
ceptible of fictitious ornaments." But Boileau 
had in mind the literary treatment of sacred 
subjects, on the stage and in the epic; he did 
not for one moment think of banishing from 
painting and sculpture those innumerable themes 
which in all Catholic countries had long been 
drawn from Scripture and the Lives of the 
Saints. The English critics were more radical, 
either out of scorn for "Popish superstition," 
or out of that Puritanic respect for religion 
which has never allowed Biblical subjects on 
the English stage. Diderot was not so blinded 
by his philosophic creed as to share a fastidious 
dislike which would exclude from the realm of 
art all the great works which the Christian in- 
spiration has produced in painting, sculpture, 
architecture, and literature. 

In his Salon of 1763, he pointed out what 



416 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

great resources Christianity afforded to artists 
"in its very crimes" (X, 184-185). Pagan 
mythology offered more voluptuous forms and 
scenes; the Christian religion, on the other 
hand, was rich in great tragedies. 14 In the 
Salon of 1765, he returned to this favorite sub- 
ject of the artistic value of Christianity with 
fresh fervor, tempered by philosophic reserva- 
tions : 

" It seems to me that since the pictures with 
which churches are adorned are made only to 
engrave the deeds of the heroes of religion in 
the memory of the people and increase their 
veneration, it is not indifferent whether they 
are good or bad. In my opinion, a church 
painter is a sort of preacher, more clear, strik- 
ing, intelligible, more readily accessible to the 
common people than the priest and his curate. 
These latter speak to ears that are often stopped 
tight. The picture speaks to the eyes, as does 

14 In this matter Diderot seems to contradict himself, 
probably under the influence of Webb and Spence, in his 
very disrespectful comparison of the Pagan with the 
Christian mythology, two years later (Essai sur la pein- 
ture, 1765; X, 490-495). But even there he recognizes 
that Kaphael, Guido, Barocci, Titian have created great 
and beautiful Christian figures. He might have dwelt 
at greater length on some of the gentler themes, like that 
of motherhood, which have graced Christian art. 



THE CRITIC 417 

the panorama of nature, which has taught us 
almost all we know. I go even further: I con- 
sider the iconoclasts and contemnors of proces- 
sions, images, statues, and all the outward 
pomps of worship, as executioners in the pay of 
the philosopher weary of superstition ; with this 
difference, that those valets do much more harm 
to superstition than their master. Abolish all 
material symbols; what is left will soon be 
nothing but a metaphysical galimatias, which 
will assume as many odd shapes and turns as 
there will be heads. . . . Those absurd rigor- 
ists do not know the effect of outward cere- 
monies on the people ; they have never seen our 
Adoration of the Cross on Good Friday, the en- 
thusiasm of the multitude at the procession of 
Corpus Christi, an enthusiasm by which I am 
myself carried away sometimes. I have never 
seen that long file of priests in sacerdotal vest- 
ments, those young alcolytes clad in white albs, 
girt in wide blue sashes, strewing flowers before 
the Holy Sacrament ; that crowd preceding and 
following them in religious silence; so many 
men prostrate on the ground ; I have never heard 
that grave, pathetic chant sung by the priests, 
affectionately answered by numberless men, wo- 
men, girls, and children, without being stirred 
in my inmost heart, without tears in my eyes. 
There is in all this something, I know not what, 
that is grand, sombre, solemn, and melancholy. 
I have known a Protestant painter who had 
28 



418 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

spent a long time in Rome, 15 and who confessed 
that he had never seen the sovereign pontiff 
officiating in Saint Peter, in the midst of 
his cardinals and clergy, without becoming a 
Catholic. He resumed his religion at the 
door. 'But, they say, those images and cere- 
monies lead to idolatry.' It is strange to see 
dealers in lies fear that the number of falsehoods 
will increase with the general infatuation for 
them. My friend, if we prefer the truth to 
the fine arts, let us pray God for the icono- 
clasts" (X, 390-391). 

Luckily, what Diderot calls " the truth " can 
tolerate the arts; "philosophy" would have 
been but a poor sort of creed if it had blinded 
its adherents to the beauties which religious 
enthusiasm has created in most lands. Diderot 
remained an admirer and a defender of the 
Christian inspiration in art. We see him in 
1767 resuming his controversy with his oppo- 
nents; not only the Protestant Webb this time, 
but also the Abbe Galiani : 

" Webb, an elegant writer and a man of taste, 
says in his Reflections on Painting that subjects 
drawn from the sacred books or the martyrology 
15 Allan Eamsay 1 ?— Diderot had dined with him and 
his family at the house of Van Loo the painter in that 
year 1765 {Volland Letters, Sept. 8, 1765; XIX, 174). 



THE CRITIC 419 

can never produce a beautiful picture. 16 That 
man has never seen Le Bran's Massacre of the 
Innocents, nor the same Massacre by Rubens, 
nor the Descent from the Cross by Hannibal 
Carracci, nor Saint Paul preaching in Athens 
by Le Sueur, nor I do not know which apostle 
or disciple rending the clothes on his breast at 
the sight of a pagan sacrifice, nor Magdalene 
wiping the Savior's feet with her beautiful hair, 
nor the same Saint so voluptuously stretched on 
the ground in her cave, by Correggio, nor a host 
of Holy Families, each more touching, beautiful, 
simple, noble, interesting than the others, nor 
my Virgin by Barocci, holding on her knees the 
infant Jesus standing and naked. That writer 
has not foreseen that he would be asked why 
Hercules choking the JSTemean lion should be 
beautiful in a picture, while Samson doing the 
same thing should displease ? Why the flay- 
ing of Marsyas, but not of Saint Bartholomew, 
may be painted ? Why Christ writing with his 
finger on the sand the absolution of the adulter- 
ous woman, in the midst of the abashed Phari- 
sees, should not be a fine picture, as beautiful 
as Phryne charged with impiety before the 
Areopagus ? Our friend Galiani, whom I like 
to hear just as much when he upholds a paradox 
16 He alludes to Webb's Seventh Dialogue (Of Com- 
position) in his Inquiry, in which Christ armed with a 
whip is unfavorably compared with Alexander carrying 
Jove 's thunder, and the martyrdom of Saint Andrew with 
the sacrifice of Iphigenia (Miscell., 1802, pp. 73-74). 



420 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

as when he proves a truth, thinks like Webb; 
and he adds that Michael Angelo had felt this, 
that he had condemned the straight hair, the 
Jewish beards, the pale, thin, mean-looking, 
common, traditional features of the apostles, 
substituting for them the antique character." 

Diderot doubts this; but, granting it to be 
true, he cannot approve that strange confusion 
(frequent indeed in the Renaissance) which 
" puts the figure of a man in contradiction with 
his manners, history, and life." If it is meant 
that Michael Angelo used to treat sacred sub- 
jects according to the proportions of the antique, 
there is nothing to say, " it is the wise course." 

But "to pronounce that the reigning super- 
stition is sterile for art, as Webb claims that it 
is, is to be ignorant of art and of the history of 
religion; one must never have seen Bernini's 
Saint Theresa, and that Virgin nursing her 
playful child naked on her knees; 17 one must 
have no idea of the pride with which certain 
fanatic Christians appeared at the foot of the 
Praetor's tribunals, before the prsetorial majesty ; 
of the cold, tranquil ferocity of the priests, and 
of the lesson derived by me from those compo- 
sitions, which instruct me better than all the 
"The " Virgin with the green cushion/' by Andrea 
Solario, in the Louvre. 



THE CBITIC 421 

philosophers in the world concerning the power 
of men possessed with that sort of demon. Pa- 
triotism and theophobia are the sources of great 
tragedies and terrifying pictures. What! the 
Christian interrupting a sacrifice, overthrowing 
altars, smashing gods, insulting the pontiff, 
braving the magistrate', does not offer a great 
sight ? All this seems to me to be seen through 
the little spectacles of Anticomania. I am Mr 
Webb's and the Abbe Galiani's humble ser- 
vant!" (XI, 344-346). 

Thus, because he felt the weakness of that 
narrow-minded neo-classicism which had then 
formidable defenders in England in Reynolds 
and Dr Johnson, Diderot sounded on his " phi- 
losophic lyre " the earliest praises of the beautes 
du christianisme, soon to be echoed by Chateau- 
briand and his Romantic progeny. What Cor- 
neille and Racine had done in an apologetic 
sort of way, he justified by theory, at a time 
when it was no small credit for a rationalist 
thus to overcome the prejudices of Rationalism. 

He never went so far as to admire the so- 
called "Gothic" architecture, which Thomas 
Warton was then timidly but insistently at- 
tempting to rescue from undeserved contempt. 
Yet, in his Essai sur la peinture (1765), when 



422 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

he said just one "word on architecture" (Chap- 
ter VI), he outlined a parallel between "the 
advantages of Greek and Roman architecture 
and the prerogatives of Gothic architecture " ; 
he was tempted to show " the latter expanding 
space inside by its high arches and light col- 
umns, destroying on the outside the imposing 
effect of the mass by the multitude and the bad 
taste of its ornaments, to bring out the analogy 
between the darkness of its colored windows and 
the incomprehensible nature of the worshipped 
Being and the sombre ideas of the worshipper " 
(X, 510). Had he developed this parallel, 
there is no doubt that he would have mingled 
many reflections of a "philosophic" nature with 
his artistic appreciations; but also, in conform- 
ity to his motto, 

Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem 

(Horace, Be Arte Poet., V, 143), 

he would have given some illuminating criti- 
cism on a subject which had inspired so many 
classical platitudes and was still obscured by 
prejudiced declamations against Gothic bar- 
barity. 

With the neo-classic worship of the ancient 



THE CRITIC 423 

artists, and the rather absurd tradition of that 
"imitation of nature" which was supposed to 
have consisted in wisely selecting and harmoni- 
ously grouping elements borrowed from reality, 
he began to quarrel in 1765, and he finally dis- 
posed of them in 1767, under the influence of 
his own reflections, his earlier studies in physi- 
ology, and suggestions from Hogarth's Analysis 
of Beauty and Garrick's conversation. 

In his preceding Salons his criticism had 
been mostly technical, probably owing to his 
association with artists like Chardin, Greuze, 
Van Loo, and intelligent amateurs like Grimm 
and Holbach ; or else it had been literary, in the 
tradition of Du Bos, Batteux, Spence, and the 
numerous critics who perpetually compared the 
plastic arts with poetry and poetry with the 
plastic arts. This literary tendency of Dide- 
rot's art criticism, with which he has been very 
severely reproached, was general at a time when 
innumerable works of academic art took their 
themes out of ancient literature; and it was in 
a sense legitimate when it led to intelligent re- 
marks concerning the composition, the expres- 
sions, the gestures of the characters represented. 
If such a critique du sujet and de la 'pantomime 



424 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

had not been allowed, how conld Diderot have 
challenged the inept composition of the pas- 
torals of Boucher, the preposterous allegories of 
La Grenee, and hundreds of insipid mytholog- 
ical, historical, fanciful pieces which reflected 
little credit on the intelligence and the original- 
ity of their perpetrators? He was right in 
energetically denouncing every work, however 
cleverly executed, which was ill-conceived, fin- 
ical, and falsely classical. Besides, Diderot 
knew how to be technical, as far as technical 
criticism is allowed to a man who is not a pro- 
fessional artist, and who writes in a Corre- 
spondance UHeraire designed for an enlightened 
public, but not for technicians. 18 

To return to his theory of the process of ar- 
tistic imitation, he first expounded it in his 
Salon of 1765 — particularly in the Essay on 
Painting which concluded and supplemented 
it— and in his Salon of 1767, "Nature," he 
said, "makes nothing incorrect. Every form, 
whether beautiful or ugly, has its cause; and, 
among all existing beings, there is not one 

18 See an excellent vindication of Diderot's criticism 
in M. E. Faguet's Dix-huitieme siecle, pp. 316 ff. (7th 
edition). 



THE CRITIC 425 

which is not as it should be " (X, 461). Every- 
thing is well formed, well balanced, according 
to certain laws which we know but imperfectly ; 
organs are shaped by their functions, and all 
the organs in one body determine and explain 
one another's form. A blind woman, a hunch- 
back, a pack-carrier, have the same organs as 
the Antinous, but differently shaped owing to 
some physiological peculiarities. 19 Then what 
is la belle nature? It is "what fits with cir- 
cumstances" (III, 485). And what is arti- 
ficial in the " academic " tradition ? It is the 
disregard of those natural relations, the ac- 
ceptance of narrow standards of taste, rules 
derived from the examples of antiquity, man- 
nerisms acquired by copying from models and 
working from the imagination; it is all that 
tends "to correct nature" in the name of bor- 
rowed ideals. 

To give an example of the difference which 
exists between true gracefulness, natural beauty, 
and the artificial standards of art, Diderot took 
his cue from the plate of sketches which Hogarth 

19 Diderot carefully investigated this point (Letter to 
M. Petit, the surgeon; IX, 239;— also XI, 371, etc.), 
which was intimately connected with his transformistie 
theories as well as with his art criticism. 



426 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

had prefixed to his Analysis of Beauty. The 
English artist had represented a ridiculous 
dancing-master, standing bolt upright, in a stiff 
attitude, by the side of the Antinous, and push- 
ing his elbow in an attempt to correct his indo- 
lent bearing. 20 

" Know what true gracefulness is," says Di- 
derot, " or that true, precise conformity of the 
limbs with the nature of the action. Above all, 
do not mistake it for that of the actor or the 
dancing-master. The gracefulness of action and 
that of Marcel [a celebrated dancing-master] 
are in direct opposition. If Marcel were to meet 
a man standing like the Antinous, he would put 
one hand under his chin, the other on his 
shoulder: 'Conie now, you awkward booby, is 
this a proper carriage?' Then, pushing back 
his knees with his own and lifting him up under 
the arms, he would add: 'You look as though 
you were made of wax and ready to melt. 
Come, you fool, stretch that leg ; turn that face 

20 The illustration which struck Diderot was thus ex- 
plained in the Analysis (Chapter VIII, also p. 20), in a 
discussion of the superstition of straight lines: "If a 
dancing-master were to see his scholar in the easy and 
gracefully turned attitude of the Antinous (fig. 6, pi. 1), 
he would cry shame on him, and tell him he looked as 
crooked as a ram's horn, and bid him hold up his head 
as he himself did. See fig. 7, pi. 1." — Diderot several 
times paraphrased this text: XI, 372, etc. 



THE CRITIC 427 

about; your nose more in the wind.' And, 
when he had made him into the most insipid 
petit-maitre, he would begin to smile at him and 
applaud himself on his work" (X, 489). 

Nature, Diderot would say to art students, 
was not the professional model, that poor crea- 
ture hired for the purpose of illustrating arti- 
ficial attitudes in a school: what is there in 
common between the man drawing water from 
a well in the courtyard and the model posing 
for the same action in a studio ? Copy reli- 
gious devotion in a Carthusian convent; copy 
anger from your fellow-student when he is truly 
in a passion; copy woodlands from the woods, 
M. Loutherbourg ! " The vaster a composition, 
the more studies from nature it will require. 
. . . Ah! if a sacrifice, a battle, a triumph, a 
public scene could be rendered with the same 
truth in all its details as a domestic scene by 
Greuze or Chardin!" (X, 505). Instead of 
which, painters of historical subjects looked 
with contempt upon the painters de genre. The 
latter drew less from their imagination, they 
copied everything from nature, and Diderot 
loved them for it. 

But is everything in nature equally beauti- 



428 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

ful ? Diderot did not think so. He admitted 
that anything may be imitated, since nothing is 
intrinsically incorrect; and in this he was a 
thorough realist. However, some works of art, 
such as those of classical antiquity, are richer in 
relations than some others; they have more of 
the inward harmony and the outward suggest- 
iveness in which beauty consists; they make a 
deeper esthetic impression. How is this ? What 
is the secret of that charm which is felt in the 
antique, or in a Michael Angelo ? 

Hogarth had believed that it consisted in a 
certain "line of beauty," a peculiar kind of 
curve which only the very great masters had 
known how to use. But he had more curiously 
than convincingly expounded his strange system 
in the Analysis of Beauty. Diderot thought 
of this book when he wrote, on the subject of 
beauty: 21 "All that is said about elliptical, cir- 
cular, serpentine, undulating lines, is absurd. 
Each part has its line of beauty, and that of the 
eye is not that of the knee. And even if the 
undulating line were the line of beauty of the 

^Pensees detachees sur la peinture, la sculpture, 
I' architecture et la poesie (published 1798), a resume in 
aphorisms of most of the theoretical matter to be found 
in the Salons, particularly those of 1765 and 1767. 



THE CEITIC 429 

human body, which are we to prefer among a 
thousand lines that undulate?" (XII, 124). 

The process of artistic imitation is made the 
object of an illuminating analysis in the open- 
ing pages of the Salon of 1765. It is not, he 
says, a mere copying of reality, " portrait 
work," as he calls it, — photography, as we 
should say; and, in spite of a venerable tradi- 
tion, the ancient masterpieces, the Venuses and 
the Apollos, were not made up with real fea- 
tures copied from various beautiful women or 
men and harmoniously combined : for how was 
the ancient artist to know which features were 
beautiful and which were not? He had no 
"antiques" to judge by, as we do in our aca- 
demic routine. It was only through a slow, 
prolonged series of attempts, corrections, and 
eliminations, that the "true line of beauty" 
was found. It is an ideal line, non-existent in 
nature, for nature does not offer any perfect 
model: the perfect model of man or woman 
should be a man or woman eminently fitted for 
all the functions of life without ever having ful- 
filled any, — a being which does not exist and 
never will exist. The academic method of the 
schools is therefore as bad as the method of 



430 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

copying nature from artificial models, which is 
also used in the schools ; for copy work, whether 
from the antique or from nature, is slavish and 
barren. The method of all great masters is 
essentially creative: the ideal model, the true 
line, exists nowhere but in the head of an 
Agasias, a Raphael, a Poussin, a Falconet. It 
is discovered and shaped anew by each artist of 
genius, and for a time it serves as a model to a 
crowd of minor artists, disciples of the sublime 
imitators of an ideal nature. 

This artistic idealism which Diderot ex- 
pounds with true eloquence, in 1767, is not 
without analogy with his Paradox on the 
Player, in which we have seen that his realistic 
conception of all arts in general, and of the art 
of acting in particular, was giving way to an 
idealistic theory represented as being Garrick' s 
own. Indeed here, in the Salon of 1767, after 
the long digression in which Hogarth's line of 
beauty is discussed, Garrick is again remem- 
bered by Diderot : 

"The famous Garrick used to say to the 
Chevalier de Chastellux : l However sensitive 
Nature may have made you, if you act only 
after yourself, or after the most perfect real 



THE CEITIC 431 

nature that you know, you will be nothing but 
mediocre.' ' Mediocre? Why so?' ' Because for 
you, for me, for the spectator, there is a certain 
possible ideal man who, in the given situation, 
would be affected very differently from you. 
This is the imaginary being whom you must 
take for your model. The stronger your con- 
ception of him, the greater, the more rare, mar- 
vellous, sublime you will be.' * Then you never 
are yourself V 'I take good care not to be. Not 
myself, Chevalier, nor anything that I exactly 
know around me. When I rend my heart, when 
I utter frightful cries, it is not my heart, it is 
not my cries, but those of another whom I have 
imagined and who does not exist.' 22 Now, my 
friend, there is no kind of poet or artist to whom 
Garrick's lesson does not apply. If you think 
over and look deeply into this saying of his, you 
will find that it contains Plato's secundus a 
22 The main idea of Diderot 's paradox, the differentia- 
tion between nature and art, must have been in the air in 
England as well as in France. Dr Johnson, we are told 
by Boswell, asked Kemble one day : ll l Are you, Sir, one 
of those enthusiasts who believe yourself transformed 
into the very character you represent?' Upon Mr. 
Kemble *s answering that he had never felt so strong a 
persuasion himself; 'To be sure not, Sir, (said Johnson;) 
the thing is impossible. And if Garrick really believed 
himself to be that monster, Eichard the Third, he de- 
served to be hanged every time he performed it. ' " 
(Boswell, Life of Johnson, edition G. Birkbeck Hill, vol. 
IV, pp. 243-244, and note; under date 1783). 



432 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

natura and tertius ah idea, both the germ and 
the proof of everything that I have said. 23 The 
models, the great models, so useful to mediocre 
men, are very harmful to men of genius" (XI, 
9-17). 

After 1767, the Salons of Diderot became 
shorter, more descriptive and technical, and less 
philosophic. His friend Grimm had requested 
him to be more concise. 24 But we may assume 
that by 1768 he had reached solutions that 
seemed satisfactory to him concerning the na- 
ture of the beautiful, the relations of art and 

23 A. Fontaine, in his work on Les doctrines d'art en 
France — Be Poussin a Diderot (Paris, 1909), Chap. IX, 
suggests that Diderot's advocacy of idealism against 
naturalism and academism in the Salon of 1767 may be 
in part determined by "Winckelmann 's influence. This 
"fanatic of the antique' ' had been criticized by Diderot 
in his Salon of 1765 (X, 417-418'). It seems to us that 
by 1767 at any rate Diderot had freed himself of 
Winckelmann 's influence through his consideration of 
the theories of Hogarth and Garrick on art. 

24 In the Assezat edition, Diderot 's Salon for 1759 has 
13 pages; — for 1761, 49 pages;— for 1763, 67 pages;— 
for 1765, 121 pages, and an Essay on Painting, 60 pages; 
—for 1767, 379 pages. Then, for 1769, 76 pages;— 
for 1771, 81 pages;— for 1775, 23 pages;— for 1781, 42 
pages. The Pensees detachees, made up of fragments 
developed or not developed in the Salons, extend over 58 
more pages. 



THE CRITIC 433 

morality, the fit subjects for artistic treatment, 
and the general theory of the process of artistic 
creation. It must be acknowledged that in the 
two Salons in which his " tyrant" (as he pleas- 
antly called Grimm) had allowed him to have 
his own way, that is, between 1765 and 1768, 
he had found the means of pricking a good 
many bubbles of traditional art criticism as he 
went along, and of correcting the early form of 
obvious naturalism with which he had set out 
a few years before. 

How his dramatic theories of 1758 would 
have fared, had he been able to revise them ten 
years later, it is difficult to imagine. His final 
pronouncement on the general subject of artistic 
imitation, as we find it in the Salon of 1767 and 
in the Paradox, written shortly after, shows that 
he had altogether forsaken his earlier critical 
positions. Now the true standard of art, whether 
in painting, or in sculpture, or in poetry, or in 
acting, was not reality, that is, sensations, any 
more than it was an academic tradition. It 
was a transcendant essence, quelque chose d'ul- 
terieur a la nature (XI, 223), "non-existent" 
of course for a disciple of Locke, yet very real 
to the inspired artist who created it, set it up 



434 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

before himself, and strove to materialize it with 
the means at his disposal. 

Concerning poetry, at any rate, Diderot in 
the latter part of his life gave some hints about 
what he preferred and what he considered fittest 
for poetic treatment. He seems to have had 
from the beginning a rather Eomantic concep- 
tion of what poetry should be; and what ac- 
quaintance he gained with English poetry, 
mostly after 1760, confirmed his prepossessions. 

Already in the Letter on the Deaf and Dumb 
(I, 371-372), while praising the French lan- 
guage as the best interpreter of reason and good 
sense, he had expressed the opinion that it was 
not as well fitted to express the passions, and 
that it was a weaker poetic instrument than 
Greek, Latin, Italian, or English. Besides, 
French had been impoverished, enervated by 
the abuse of a so-called " noble language " or 
poetic diction (I, 388). Supposing however 
that French had kept all its poetic resources, 
how could any great outburst of poetry be ex- 
pected in a highly polished age ? Diderot tells 
us that in his youth he had sometimes felt the 
poetic spirit stirring within himself (I, 374), 



THE CEITIC 435 

probably at that time when he "was fed with 
the milk of Homer and the prophets. " 2 5 " Poetry 
needs something enormous, barbaric, savage/' 
primitive manners and wild nature; its well- 
springs might be opened again on the morrow 
of some huge social cataclysm, but not in the 
refined and artificial age of philosophy (VIII, 
370). 

To the question : " Is the philosophic spirit 
favorable or not favorable to poetry ? " Diderot 
unhesitatingly replied that it was not. " There 
is more poetic spirit (verve) among barbaric 
than among civilized nations; more among the 
Hebrews than among the Greeks; more among 
the Greeks than among the Eomans; more 
among the Romans than among the Italians 
and the French; more among the English than 
among the latter" (XI, 131). Philosophy and 
reason drive poetry and imagination out of a 
country. Superstition, prejudices depart, "and 
it is incredible what resources poetry loses 

25 Life in the country inspired him in the same way, but 
too rarely, as is shown by some of his letters from 
Grandval, or that eloquent page in the Salon of 1767 
on the eternal longing of men cooped up in cities for the 
country, their true abode: "0 rus, quando te aspiciam?" 
(XI, 112). 



436 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

through unbelief. Manners become civilized; 
barbaric, poetic, picturesque customs disappear ; 
and this monotonous politeness does incredible 
harm to poetry" (XI, 131). That is the rea- 
son why Pindar is no longer understood, and 
Milton is despised. Taste is opposed to genius 
and sublime poetry; classical correctness sup- 
presses the vagaries of the imagination. 

England and ancient Greece offer examples 
of the true, genuine poetic spirit : " Genius and 
the sublime shine in Shakespeare like flashes 
of lightning in a long night, while Racine is 
always beautiful: Homer is full of genius, 
Vergil of elegance. . . . One dialect did not 
suffice to supply Homer with the expressions 
necessary to his genius ; Milton at every moment 
violates the rules of his language, 26 and looks 
for energetic phrases in three or four different 
tongues" (XV, 37). 

When in 1762 Voltaire began his Commerv- 

26 Diderot in 1763 sees Milton's "darkness visible" in 
a certain landscape by Vernet (X, 202). He elsewhere 
(XVIII, 105) commits a slight blunder when he fancies 
the blind poet sadly watching cartloads of copies of his 
immortal poem going back to the paper factories. Dide- 
rot had a copy of Paradise Lost with him in his prison at 
Vincennes, and filled its margins with notes. 



THE CRITIC 437 

iaim sur Corneille, in order to provide a dowry 
for an indigent descendant of the great tragic 
poet, he made occasional references to Shake- 
speare, illustrating his criticism of Medee, or of 
Cinna, with quotations from Macbeth, or from 
Julius Ccesar: this was not intended to estab- 
lish any comparison between " the wild and per- 
nicious irregularities of Shakespeare." and "the 
profound judgment of Corneille," 27 but to show 
the various resources of two different dramatic 
traditions. Diderot seems to have thought that 
Voltaire was a little too lukewarm in his praise 
of Shakespeare: "Confess that Shakespeare is 
indeed a very extraordinary man. There is not 
one of those scenes which, with a little talent, 
could not be made into a great thing. Would 
it not be a fine beginning for a tragedy to have 
two senators upbraiding a debased rabble for 
the applause which they have just been lavish- 
ing on their tyrant? And then what a rapid 
flow! what harmony!" (XIX, 465). It has 
become a sort of tradition in literary history 
that Diderot undertook to defend the fame of 

27 Voltaire, CEuvres, Moland edition, vol. XXXI, p. 343, 
commentary on Cinna. Diderot 's letter to Voltaire, which 
deals mostly with the difficulties of the Encyclopedie, 
was written Sept. 29, 1762. 



438 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Shakespeare against Voltaire, " the sworn en- 
emy of pedestals." 28 But his praise of Shake- 
speare seems mild enough when we see how 
careful he is not to commit himself too far, and 
what contemporaries he classes with the great 
English playwright: "I consider Sedaine as 
one of the great-grandchildren of Shakespeare, 
that Shakespeare whom I shall not compare 
with the Apollo of the Belvedere, or the Gladia- 
tor, or the Antinous, or Glycon's Hercules, but 
rather with the Saint Christopher of Notre- 
Dame, a shapeless, rudely carved colossus, yet 
between whose legs we might all pass without 
touching him" (VIII, 384). He regretted 
that both Sedaine and Shakespeare had lacked 
a classical education. Yet at the same time he 
admired Shakespeare's power not only in his 
mob scenes, but in those very "butcheries" 

28 Thus Diderot, in a curious vindication of Voltaire 
(1769) against a certain Abbe Chaudon (VI, 351 ff.). — 
Diderot's comparison of Shakespeare with Saint Christo- 
pher is also found in his letter of Dee. 18, 1776, to 
Frangois Tronchin (printed in H. Tronchin, Le Conseiller 
Frangois Tronchin, Paris, 1895, p. 227) ; — also in Metra's 
Correspondance, 2d edition, 1787, vol. VI, p. 425, in a 
conversation between Diderot, Voltaire and Madame 
Denis, of which it is difficult to say where it might have 
taken place. 



THE CRITIC 439 

which an over-delicate and over-sensitive na- 
tion would not permit: why then, he said, let 
us be logical, and exclude the Greek GEdipus, 
Philoctetes, the Eumenides, from polite litera- 
ture (VIII, 393). When Ducis offered an im- 
proved and polished Shakespeare to French au- 
diences, Diderot had enough sense to prefer the 
rude original. 

This is because he was more responsive to 
the suggestive power of poetry than to any clas- 
sical regularity or correctness. His admiration 
sprang from emotional rather than intellectual 
sources. Darkness, terror, melancholy seemed 
to him more poetical than light, mirth and 
happy moods. 

" Light (la clarte) is good to convince ; it has 
no power to move. Light, or clearness, how- 
soever we understand it, is inimical to enthu- 
siasm. Poets, talk always of eternity, infinity, 
immensity, time, space, divinity, tombs, Manes, 
hell, dark skies, deep seas, dim forests, thunder, 
flashes rending the clouds. Be dark. Great 
noises heard from afar, waterfalls heard and 
unseen, silence, solitude, the desert, ruins, cav- 
erns, the sound of veiled drums beaten at inter- 
vals, the strokes of a bell slowly tolling and 
awaited by the ear, the screech of night birds, 
the howls of wild beasts in winter, during the 



440 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

night, particularly when mingled with the mur- 
mur of the winds . . . there is in all these 
things I know not what that is awful, great and 
dark" (XI, 147). 

Such a passage clearly points the way to all 
the themes of pre-romantic and romantic poetry. 
It is not surprising that the names of Milton, 
Gray, Young, and Ossian are mentioned almost 
immediately after this suggestive page in the 
Salon of 1767. 

Diderot seems to have become widely ac- 
quainted, between 1760 and 1770, with some 
of the most original aspects of English poetry 
in his age, probably through Hoop, Garrick, and 
other friends. 29 In October 1761, he was send- 

29 Hoop for the Scottish songs, and perhaps for Ossian ; 
Garrick for Gray. Diderot's paragraph on Ossian, which 
we quote, may have been prompted by the reading of 
Conlath and Cuthona.— It is interesting to compare with 
Diderot's enthusiastic appreciation the gruff comments 
of Johnson in his Life of Gray: "In 1757, he published 
the Progress of Poetry and The Bard, two compositions 
at which the readers of poetry were at first content to 
gaze in mute amazement. Some that tried them con- 
fessed their inability to understand them, though War- 
burton said that they were understood as well as the 
works of Milton and Shakespeare, which it is the fashion 
to admire. Garrick wrote a few lines in their praise. 
Some hardy champions undertook to rescue them from 



THE CRITIC 441 

ing Shylvic and Vinivela and other Scottish 
songs to Sophie Volland, remarking that there 
reigned in those pieces a taste which "con- 
founded" him (XIX, 67). In 1767, he exulted 
in reading the song of Gray's Bard, and some 
of the Macpherson poems, which with most of 
his contemporaries he took to be genuine : 

" Ossian, a chief, a warrior, a poet, and a 
musician, hears in the night the trees murmur- 
ing around his abode ; he rises, he cries : ' Souls 
of my friends, I hear you ; you upbraid me for 
my silence.' He takes up his lyre, he sings; 
and, after he has sung, he says : ( Souls of my 
friends, now you are immortal; be then satis- 
fied, and let me rest.' In his old age, a Bard 
asks to be led among the graves of his children ; 
he sits down, lays both his hands on the cold 
stone which covers their ashes, and sings of 
them. Meanwhile the air, or rather the wander- 
ing souls of his children, caressed his face and 
his long beard. O beautiful manners ! beau- 
tiful poetry!" (XI, 181-182). 
neglect, and in a short time many were content to be 
shewn beauties which they could not see. ' ' 

Johnson's Life of Savage, translated by Le Tourneur 
in 1771, was described by Diderot in his review of it 
(IX, 451) as "a book which would have been delightful, 
if the English author had proposed to satirize his hero; 
but unfortunately he is in earnest. ' ' 



442 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

In 1771 lie reviewed Le Tourneur's transla- 
tion (1769) of Yonng's Night Thoughts, "a 
poem of the finest black dye that you could pos- 
sibly imagine, which the translator has been 
clever enough to make readable for a nation 
whose mind is rosy-colored. It is true that this 
tint is beginning to fade" (IX? 451). As 
Grimm had not shown much warmth in recom- 
mending Young's poem to the readers of the 
Correspondance litteraire, Diderot finely took 
him to task (June, 1770) : " You must say that 
the Night Thoughts are a great book. Is it 
nothing to have succeeded in making a frivol- 
ous, gay nation like ours relish jeremiads?" 
(XX, 13). Thomson, whose Life by Johnson 
Diderot reviewed, was more harshly treated. 30 
Diderot saw in him a mere neo-classic, and 
crushed the English Seasons with the Latin 
Georgics, Thomson with Vergil : " His Muse is 
like Notre-Dame de Lorette, while the Muse of 
Vergil is a Venus. . . . Thomson is a corrupter 
of taste" (IX, 451). He would have said of 
Thomson's Seasons what he said of the pastorals 

30 It is to be wished that Thomson should no longer be 
described as "auteur des Nuits d 'Young," as he is in 
the Index of the latest edition of Diderot's works. 



THE CEITIC 443 

of Gessner and of Leonard : " Those rustic man- 
ners do not exist anywhere in the world; it is 
all false ; but if you admit the possibility of such 
country people, everything is true. ... I am 
like the children ; I never discuss the foundation 
of a tale which amuses me" (VI, 418). Un- 
fortunately, Thomson's pastorals failed to amuse 
him, and that is why he was as hard to him as 
he had been to Boucher. 31 

" O the poets, the poets ! " the philosopher 
sometimes exclaims. " Plato knew what he was 
doing when he drove them out of his republic. 
They have not any right ideas about anything. 
Interpreting falsehood and truth alternately, 
their enchanting jargon infects a whole nation, 
and twenty volumes of philosophy are less read 
and accomplish less good than one of their songs 
does harm" (VI, 414). 

This brief consideration of some of Diderot's 

cursory judgments on English poets shows that 

what interested him most in English poetry was 

31 Occasional references to Dryden, Swift, Prior, Milton, 
Pope, are to be found in various parts of Diderot's 
(Euvres as we 'know them, which sufficiently show that 
he was as widely read in English poetry as any of his 
French contemporaries. It would have been unprofitable 
to mention all these references here, and only the most 
significant have been used. 



444 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

not the neo-classical tradition, the academism of 
poetry, which he found in Pope and in Thom- 
son, but the new spirit, the new sources of emo- 
tion which were soon to become known as the 
sources of Romantic inspiration. His favorite 
English poets were exactly those whom Samuel 
Johnson was most unwilling or most unable to 
appreciate. It is truly curious to see two men 
so eminently representative of their respective 
countries during the latter half of the eighteenth 
century, and each of whom seems to have care- 
fully avoided mentioning the other by name, 
judge English poetry from two absolutely oppo- 
site standpoints: the English critic, from the 
classical rules which had been framed in 
seventeenth-century France ; the French philos- 
opher, in the spirit of the independent poetic 
tradition of England which was being revived 
by the " school of Milton " and the English Pre- 
romanticists. Johnson harked back to the 
artistic gospel of the past; Diderot hailed with 
enthusiasm the inspirations of the future. If 
Beauty is not, any more than Truth, a fixed 
quantity, an immutable essence, an innate sort 
of light, " of the Eternal co-eternal beam," and 
if the reason why it has for so long eluded the 



THE CEITIC 445 

attempts made to grasp it within definitions is, 
that being an ideal it follows for ever the evolu- 
tion of the human mind, the most thankless as 
well as the most harmful undertaking of criti- 
cism may be to try and abide by " a fixed faith 
and constant axioms." Diderot preferred to 
open his mind wide to all influences, and to fore- 
stall the tastes and the beliefs of posterity. 



CONCLUSION 

Diderot, who dearly loved paradoxes, for the 
soul of truth which they contain, might have 
liked to hear about " Diderot the most German 
of all the French," and " Diderot the English- 
man." In truth, if we consider his tempera- 
ment and habits of thought, he appears as 
" eminently French, a Frenchman of the Centre, 
of Champagne or Burgundy, of the Seine or the 
Marne, and he was par excellence a Frenchman 
of the middle-class." 1 Like many other French 
citizens who are loath to stir from home, he was 
lavish in his enthusiastic praise of the foreign 
nations concerning which he knew nothing but 
by hearsay, and which he was content to admire 
on trust : " Look at England ! " these worthy 
people exclaim; "look at the United States!" 
or at any other distant country that happens to 
serve their purpose. This gives weight to an 
argument, for men readily believe much about 
lands which they have not seen: major a 

*E. Faguet, Dix-huitieme siecle, 7 th edition, 1890, p. 
279. 

446 



CONCLUSION 447 

longinquo reverentia. And this panegyrist of 
English virtue, boldness, and liberty, is Diderot 
as he generally appears in his works. To him, 
as to Voltaire, the adversaries of the philosophic 
propaganda must have often said: "You are 
always quoting the English to us, it is the rally- 
ing-cry of the philosophers." 2 But Diderot, in 
his letters and his conversation, was more re- 
served and reticent than in his works, on the 
subject of England; his enthusiasm sometimes 
wavered, and he willingly relied on the testi- 
mony of other people. It was not possible for 
him, as it was for Voltaire, to boast that he had 
discovered England for the French; and conse- 
quently he never set himself up as an oracle on 
English things. 

This little French bourgeois, however, was 
" a fine genius, to whom nature had given great 
wings," and even " a transcendent genius which 
had no equal in his age." 3 Curious of every- 
thing that came from the nation which was 

2 Voltaire, Dialogues Chretiens, "Premier (Jialogue, 
entre un pretre et un encyclopediste ; ' ' Moland edition, 
vol. XXIV, p. 132. 

3 Diderot was thus characterized by Voltaire and by 
Kousseau; quoted by E. Bersot, Etudes sur le XVlII e 
siecle, 1855, vol. II, p. 147. 



448 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

the first in modern times to free human thought 
from the threats of the law, he read many Eng- 
lish books, meditated much over his reading; 
and thus it came about, through this vast book- 
knowledge as well as through his warm praises 
of England, that by his contemporaries he was 
considered as a kind of authority on English 
thought. He owed a great many suggestions to 
English philosophy and English literature ; but, 
from a cosmopolitan point of view, it is a ques- 
tion whether English writers were not eventually 
more indebted to him than he had been to them. 
Diderot was a very active agent in the dif- 
fusion of English thought. Of all the kinds of 
intellectual action which comparative literature 
brings under the rather vague designation of 
" influence/' there is scarcely one of which Di- 
derot does not afford some example in his rela- 
tions with English writers of every description. 
The history of his indebtedness to them may 
be said to have begun with translations, to have 
continued with adaptations, then with "con- 
tinuations," digressions, manifold reminiscen- 
ces, and occasional criticisms. Erom the time 
when he was doing hack-work for the Parisian 
booksellers, to the days when he was acknowl- 



CONCLUSION 449 

edged as a great representative of eighteenth- 
century philosophy, a Father of the yet unnamed 
Positivistic Church, he indef atigably worked for 
the propagation of many scientific, philosophic, 
and literary ideas of English origin, not only 
through translations and imitations, but, what 
was infinitely more interesting and fruitful, by 
a large number of original works in which the 
foreign suggestions served as nuclei for fertile 
developments, or as starting-points for bold 
generalizations which soared far beyond them. 
Thus he vastly increased the intrinsic wealth of 
what he borrowed, while broadening his person- 
ality. Our outline of his intellectual biography 
in relation to England has therefore aimed not 
merely at tracing evidences of direct disciple- 
ship, but also at describing a series of interesting 
reactions under the foreign influence. 

Had he not been endowed with great original 
power as well as with an exceptional faculty of 
assimilation, his connection with England would 
not be of much more importance to us than that 
of many other English scholars of his age and 
country, 4 Desfontaines, Eidous, Toussaint, La 

4 Some of these however contributed not a little to the 
modification of the French literary taste and standards: 
see Mary G. dishing, P. Le Tourneur, New York, 1909. 
30 



450 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Place, Madame Riccoboni, and a score more of 
obscure abbes, poor scribblers, unsuccessful 
actresses, all sedulous day-laborers in the field 
of letters. He might have gone on translating 
Grecian Histories, Medicinal Dictionaries, Es- 
says on Virtue, Cyclopaedias, English plays, and 
secured for himself an honorable, inconspicuous 
place among the people who in each age have 
tried to make the intellectual wealth of one na- 
tion accessible to another. Instead of this, the 
history of his connection with English thought 
is one of gradual emancipation. In the space 
of approximately twenty years, between 1745 
and 1763 or 1765, the translator of English 
books became a powerful interpreter of English 
ideas; and, thanks to the great prestige which 
the French language and literature enjoyed 
in Europe, he was able to effect a wider and 
deeper diffusion of those ideas than any of his 
contemporaries could have done. Fairly sub- 
missive to the influence of his first masters, 
Shaftesbury and Bacon, fervid to a fault in 
his intense admiration for them and for Rich- 
ardson, he asserted more independence in his 
activity as a dramatist — and this is perhaps a 
matter for regret: for, if instead of merely 



CONCLUSION 451 

pointing to the dramas of Lillo and Moore for 
a justification of his timely reaction against the 
dramatic tradition of France, he had boldly 
attacked the problems of the Shakespearean 
dramaturgy, if he had given half as much atten- 
tion and sympathy to the art of Shakespeare as 
he had done to the art of Eichardson or to the 
ethics of Shaftesbury, and displayed the same 
ingenuity in bringing out the hidden merits of 
Hamlet as in vindicating the beauties of Cla- 
rissa Harlowe, he would have done more for 
literature in general and for himself than by 
inventing the genre serieux. In the novel, it has 
seemed to us that, while more or less reminis- 
cent of Eichardson and Sterne, he followed an 
independent vein, trying to derive his material 
either from reality or from philosophy — a phi- 
losophy both practical and theoretical, combative 
and speculative. Lastly, in criticism, a portion 
of his work which in spite of its lack of con- 
sistency is of great value, 5 all the English influ- 
ences that were brought to bear upon him, save 
that of Garrick alone, resulted in opposition on 

6 Diderot introduced life into criticism : see Sainte-Beuve, 
Causeries du lundi, vol. Ill, and G. Saintsbury, History 
of Criticism, vol. Ill, Chap. IV.) 



452 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

his part. Yet, even while his mind became more 
and more detached from England, both through 
his gradual disenchantment concerning the 
" Philosophic Country " and through the clearer 
consciousness which he had acquired of his own 
powers, it is to be noted that Diderot hailed such 
poets as Young, Gray, and " Ossian " with great 
enthusiasm, as though he discerned in their 
writings the promise of a wonderful poetic 
harvest for the future. 

It would be exceedingly difficult to determine 
what Diderot accomplished on the whole for 
les idees anglaises, that is, for the spirit of lib- 
erty in matters of philosophy and literature. 
All the English ideas which interested this very 
French intellect received from it a new life and 
a radical form. How far this transformation 
assisted their progress in continental Europe, 
what was gained for the Positivistic tendencies 
of Bacon, Locke, and Shaftesbury, for the Beal- 
ism of Lillo and Eichardson, by the advocacy of 
the enthusiastic philosopher, cannot be definitely 
expressed. It is beyond doubt that he con- 
tributed a great deal to the fame of Shaftesbury 
and of Eichardson outside of England, that he 
initiated the worship for Bacon, and that he 



CONCLUSION 453 

gave to the moral English drama of the eigh- 
teenth century a European reputation which it 
might never have obtained through its own 
deserts. " Tout s'exagere, tout s'enrichit un peu 
dans ma pensee et dans mon discours" (XI, 
115). His mind acted as a great focus of con- 
centration and irradiation; thus it is that he 
appears not only as eminently representative of 
his age, but as a forerunner of several currents 
of human thought which were followed up in 
later ages. 

The very success of the main ideas for which 
he stood, the wide acceptance which they re- 
ceived in Europe in the nineteenth century, may 
have prevented him from obtaining the share of 
credit which he expected from posterity. To 
modern readers of his works, there is apparently 
no very great hardiesse in contending that psy- 
chology should be studied empirically ; that the 
foundation of ethics is essentially social, and 
that right living is not inseparable from a given 
set of " right beliefs " ; that the ethical as well 
as the religious creeds vary in different forms 
of society, and that none of them can claim to 
be absolutely the best ; that toleration therefore 
must reign everywhere; that the greatest riddle 



454 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

of all, for a mind unenlightened by supernatural 
agencies, is not so much the existence of God 
and His relations with man and the present 
order of the world, as the universe itself, its 
past transformations, the nature and the origin 
of life, and the relations between animate and 
inanimate nature. At the close of a highly 
positive and utilitarian age, such as the nine- 
teenth century has been, there is nothing very 
new in the idea that metaphysical systems, how- 
ever sublime they may be, are of less value to 
man than experimental sciences and their appli- 
cations; that the human intellect does not lose 
in dignity by applying itself to act on matter 
instead of merely analyzing itself ; that manual 
labor deserves much respect ; and that a compen- 
dium of human knowledge, an encyclopedia, 
should devote more space to the description of 
the useful arts in their present state than to the 
curiosities of their history. Lastly, there is 
nothing very startling for us in the denunciation 
of the errors of Pseudo-Classicism and Acad- 
emism, when even the gospels of Romanticism, 
Realism, and Naturalism have in their turn been 
denounced, controverted, and finally laid to rest. 
It remains true, nevertheless, that in almost 



CONCLUSION 455 

every field of human thought Diderot "placed 
himself at the point of view whence, more com- 
prehensively than was possible from any other, 
he discerned the long course and the many bear- 
ings, the complex faces and the large ramifica- 
tions, of the huge movement of his day. ... To 
whatever quarter he turned, he caught the ris- 
ing illumination and was shone upon by the 
spirit of the coming day. It was no copious and 
overflowing radiance, but they were the beams 
of the dawn." 6 

Complicated as the question of Diderot's in- 
fluence on his age in France and abroad is made 
by the transformation which every idea under- 
went in his seething intellect, obscured as it is 
also by the diffused nature of his action and by 
the vast number of forces which acted from 
other quarters in the same directions, the prob- 
lem seems to be made more difficult still for the 
student of literary history by the manner in 
which Diderot's most important works saw the 
light. A large part of his writings appeared 
posthumously. His contemporaries knew him 
mainly as the editor of the Encyclopedie, the 
originator of a system of dramatic reforms 

6 John Morley, Diderot . . ., vol. I, p. 309. 



456 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

which did not seem to be bearing much fruit, 
and the author of a few ill-digested philosophic 
famtaisies of which the less said the better. 
Some of his most interesting works were never 
intended by him for publication ; they were first 
printed in the very last years of the eighteenth 
and at various times throughout the nineteenth 
century. Of Diderot one may truly say, as of 
Pascal, Madame de Sevigne, and Saint-Simon, 
that we know him much better than his con- 
temporaries ever did, and that consequently he 
will for ever puzzle the constructions of "evo- 
lutionistic" criticism. "It should be clearly 
known," says Brunetiere emphatically, "that 
Diderot's contemporaries were not able to read 
his Religieuse, nor the Neveu de Rameau, nor 
the Reve de D'Alembert, nor the Salons. . . . m 
It is true ; and yet not absolutely true. For, 
if the public at large was not able to read 
Jacques le Fataliste, for instance, before 1796, 
or D'Alembert's Bream before 1830, or the 
whole collection of the Salons before 1877, there 
was a body of privileged readers, not at all small 

7 Brunetiere, Manuel de I 'hist, de la litt. frang., 1898, 
p. 326, in the notes. — For the chronology of Diderot's 
main works, see Appendix II. 



CONCLUSION 457 

or unimportant, which became acquainted with 
many of Diderot's most curious works in manu- 
script form long before they were printed. The 
manuscripts of this " (Liable d'homme" had a 
long and eventful career. When Diderot died, 
they were scattered everywhere, in the hands 
of the Parisian police, in the iron safe of the 
French king, among the papers of Grimm, 
Naigeon, Mme de Vandeul, in the libraries of 
the king of Prussia, of various German princes, 
of the empress of Kussia; and, what was more 
important, they were read by Lessing, Schiller 
and Goethe, and highly praised by them. " Di- 
derot is Diderot," Goethe wrote, " a peculiar in- 
dividuality; whoever holds him or his doings 
cheaply is a Philistine, and the name of them 
is legion. Men know neither from God, nor 
from Nature, nor from their fellows, how to 
receive with gratitude what is valuable beyond 
appraisement." 8 

Is it because of this favorable reception in 
Germany, where he seems to have early become 

8 Quoted in J. Morley, Diderot . . ., vol. I, pp. 7-8. — 
See F. Papillon, Des rapports philosophiques de Goethe 
et de Diderot, in Travaux de VAcademie des sciences 
morales et politiques, 1874 ; vol. 101, pp. 245 ff. 



458 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

more famous than he was at home, that Diderot 
rather suffered at the hands of some French 
critics in the latter part of the nineteenth cen- 
tury? Is it because he was such "a peculiar 
individuality," an anti-classicist, a romanticist, 
a positivist, a realist, and, taken all together, an 
antagonist of every kind of tradition, that he 
irritated Brunetiere as much as he had disgusted 
Carlyle ? It would be too long to trace the " his- 
tory of the variations" of criticism, and par- 
ticularly of French criticism, in relation to Di- 
derot. One great reason at least stands out which 
explains why he has often been held cheap by 
his own countrymen : his genius had more power 
than lucidity and coherence; he thought like a 
prophet rather than like a philosopher, and he 
wrote like an inspired orator rather than like 
a stylist. The philosophy of Voltaire has been 
unkindly described as " a chaos of clear ideas " ; 
the philosophy of Diderot is a chaos of ideas 
that are seldom very clear — "ce sont des idees 
qui sont devenues ivres et qui se sont mises a 
courir les unes apres les autres," said the Cheva- 
lier de Chastellux. Diderot's fire is often ob- 
fuscated with a good deal of smoke ; and this is 



CONCLUSION 459 

a failing which French criticism will seldom 
condone. 

But, even when we acknowledge, as Diderot 
himself repeatedly did with expressions of re- 
gret, that he had sometimes allowed his imagina- 
tion too much liberty, that he had trifled with 
his higher gifts or too liberally put them at the 
service of other men, when we wish that he had 
concentrated his powers, and written less but 
with greater care, are we sure that such a 
discipline could have been of great advantage 
to him ? Is it certain that if Diderot had been 
a more scrupulous and less prolific writer he 
could have done better than he has done, or even 
as well? He was excellent in improvisation, 
but there are good reasons to believe that in his 
case the limce labor gave but poor results. He 
could be a brilliant journalist, a reviewer, an 
orator, but scarcely a great writer. What is 
most admired in his works, that is, his philo- 
sophic dialogues, his Salons, his short stories, 
his letters, is what cost him the least labor; 
while his painstaking attempts in dramatic lit- 
erature have produced nondescripts which are 
well nigh execrable. 



460 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Unfortunately, it is from this viewpoint of 
the drama that many eminent literary critics 
have taken their surveys of Diderot as a whole. 
Philosophic critics have founded their estimates 
of him partly on the consideration of his moral 
theories — a treacherous quicksand, to say the 
least. But then Diderot is not essentially a 
dramatist, or a moralist, notwithstanding what 
he and his contemporaries may have thought 
about it. His work in those fields has been 
mostly critical and destructive. The construct- 
ive, positive side of his genius proved most suc- 
cessful in science, or rather in two distinct 
branches of scientific thought which are not 
identical with scientific research: he initiated 
the popularization of science and its applica- 
tions through the Encyclopedie; and, from the 
data of science in his time, he made some inter- 
esting generalizations which resulted in a meta- 
physical theory of man and the universe, known 
to-day as Transformism. 

" They are happy men," Bacon had said, 9 
" whose natures sort with their vocations ; other- 
wise they may say, Multum incola fuit anima 
mea, when they converse in those things they do 
9 Bacon, Essays, No. 38, ' ' Of Nature in Men. ' ' 



CONCLUSION 461 

not affect." Diderot, if we believe him, was not 
a happy man in this respect : he had against his 
wish been forced to dwell in many intellectual 
regions which he would fain have left to others. 
Yet when we consider how from the beginning 
of his career he had shown the greatest variety 
of interest, and how in his later years he never 
took up any topic of science, art, philosophy, or 
literature without infusing new life into it and 
making it more fruitful than it was before, it 
seems as though his greatest gift had been a 
wonderful ability to make his nature sort with 
almost any vocation. Men whose minds are 
methodical, and inclined to be dogmatic, for 
whom there is no doubt concerning the unity and 
immutability of truth, and who have been so 
happy as to hit upon this truth once and for 
all time, will always be disappointed and irri- 
tated by Diderot. Other men, who, after Di- 
derot's example, look in books only for inspira- 
tion, for suggestiveness, for the fine page which 
is full of power, will not be tempted to reproach 
him with his versatility, or to characterize him 
with the less creditable traits of his rich and 
exuberant nature. We have seen how varied 
his mind was in its aspects, how open to every 



462 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

influence. Many of his ideas seem prophetic, 
because they were developed out of suggestions 
pregnant with potential truth. It was through 
this broadness of mind, this interest in other 
men's opinions, this curiosity of foreign thought 
and particularly of English thought, that he 
succeeding in transcending his age. 

Finis. 



APPENDIX I 

A. A Letter from Voltaire to G. Keate 

(The following letter, which at the time it was 
copied was among the British Museum MSS exhibits, 
is not included in the Moland edition of the Works 
of Voltaire, and we are not aware of its having been 
published anywhere else.) 

Had I not fix'd the seat of my retreat in the free 
corner of Geneva, I would certainly live in the free 
kingdom of England, for, tho I do not like the 
monstrous irregularities of Shakespear, tho I admire 
but some lively and masterly strokes in his perform- 
ances, yet I am confident nobody in the world looks 
with a greater veneration on your good philosophers, 
on the croud of your good authors, and I am these 
thirty years the disciple of your way of thinking. 
Your nation is at once a people of warriours and 
of philosophers. You are now at the pitch of glory 
in regard to publick affairs. But I know not 
whether you have preserv'd the reputation your island 
enjoy'd in point of litterature when Addison, Con- 
greve, Pope, Swift, were alive. However you kan 
not be so low as we are. Poor France at the present 
time has neither navy or money, nor plate nor fame, 
nor witt. We are at the ebb of all. 

I have read the life of Mad e . de Pompadour printed 
at London. Indeed, S r ., 't is a scurrilous book, I 
assure you that there is not one page of truth. 
463 



464 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Pray, in case some good book appears into y r . 
world, let me be informed of it. Adieu, mon cher 
jeune philosophe. Je eompte sur votre souvenir et 
je vous aimerai toujours. 

Y r . for ever 

Voltaire. 
aux Delices, 16 Janvier 1760. 

B. Letters from Diderot to David Hume 

(Reprinted from J. H. Burton, Letters of Eminent 
Persons addressed to David Hume, Edinburgh, 1849, 
pp. 280-287. Numerous corrections are made, from 
the collation by Mr H. W. Meikle, to whom we here 
again express our thanks. We have modernized the 
spelling, except for proper names.) 



Si le mauvais succes des services que vous avez 
rendus, monsieur et tres honore philosophe, ne vous 
a point degoute de la bienfaisance, 1 vous ne serez 
point offense de la liberte que je prends de vous 
recommander celui qui aura l'honneur de vous re- 
mettre cette lettre. C'est un homme auquel Mad e 
Diderot s'interesse. C'est un parent de ses amis. 
C'est un honnete homme qui ne s'expatrie avec sa 
famille avec aucun motif qui soit reprehensible. 
Faites pour lui tout ce que vous attendriez de moi 
pour quelqu'un que vous m'auriez adresse, et a qui 
je pourrais etre utile. Faites qu'il tire parti de ce 
qu'il peut avoir de talent. Faites qu'il vive, lui, sa 

2 An allusion to Hume's quarrel with Eousseau, 1766. 



LETTEES 465 

femme, qui est la meilleure femme du monde, et son 
enfant, qui a du courage et de la raison fort au dela 
de la mesure de son age. Tres aime et tres honore 
David, vous savez bien qu'il n'y a aucune loi civile 
ni religieuse qui ait rompu ni pu rompre le lien de 
fraternite que nature a etabli entre tous les hommes. 
Vous savez aussi que ce lien nous attache encore 
d'une maniere plus indispensable et plus sacree aux 
malheureux qu'aux autres. Secourez, done, de votre 
mieux celui que je vous adresse. Comme vous 
n'etes pas moins excellent homme qu'excellent auteur, 
vous penserez avec moi, qui n'ai que la moitie de ce 
merite, qu'apres tout, le soir, quand on se retire et 
qu'on cause avec soi, on est encore plus content d'une 
bonne action que d'une belle page. 2 Je vous salue et 
vous embrasse de tout mon cceur; et je suis, avec 
estime et veneration, monsieur et tres honore phi- 
losophe, votre tres humble et tres obeissant serviteur, 
Paris, ce 24 9 bre [1767] . 3 

Diderot. 
2 

Paris, ce 22 fevrier 1768. 
Je ne suis pas mort, monsieur et tres honore 
David; il vous reste toujours un ami et un admirateur 
sincere a Paris. Mais j'ai beaucoup souffert d ? une 
humeur goutteuse qui a commence a se faire sentir 
au bras gauche, qui s'est metamorphosee successive- 

4 Comp. Diderot, (Euvres Completes, III, 539. 

1 We infer this to be the date from the reference to the 
same affair of the Neufvilles in February, 1768 (see 
next letter). 
31 



466 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

ment en mal de poitrine, en douleur d'estomac, colique 
d'entrailles, et finalement en une effroyable fluxion 
d'oreilles, qui m'a detenu presque tout le mois de 
Janvier au coin du feu, sans pouvoir travailler, et, 
qui pis est, sans pouvoir reposer ni dormir. J'en 
suis quitte pour une surdite d'un earaetere tout par- 
tieulier. J'entends tres bien ceux qui parlent, mais 
je parle si bas que les autres ont peine a m'entendre. 
Le son de ma voix retentit si fortement dans ma 
tete caverneuse et sonore, que, pour peu qu'il soit 
fort, je m'etourdis moi-meme. 

C'est la serie de ees indispositions qui m'a empeche 
de vous remercier des marques d'humanite que vous 
avez donnees a mes pauvres concitoyens. Ne vous 
decouragez pas. Cette pauvre femme, qui a si peu 
merite son triste sort, m'en fait une peinture si 
affligeante que je n'ose pas relire sa lettre. On ne 
lui a pas eonseille le voyage d' Angleterre ; elle y a 
ete appelee par un epoux quelle s'est fait un devoir 
de suivre, au hasard de toutes les nouvelles peines 
auxquelles elle pourrait s'exposer. Je vous reponds 
de son honnetete et de ses mceurs. D'ailleurs, mon 
clier philosophe, je m'en rapporte la-dessus a votre 
propre tact. Vous qui savez si bien lire dans les 
ames de ceux qui ont joue quelque role sur la scene 
du monde, vous devez aussi savoir interroger eelles 
qui se demenent autour de vous. Frappez a celle-la, 
et vous n'en ferez rien sortir qui ne vous plaise et 
ne vous interesse. Elle emportait avec elle, pour 
toute pacotille, quelques petits talents qui se trouvent 
presqu'inutiles a, Londres. Ne verrons-nous jamais 



LETTERS 467 

finir ces aversions nationales qui resserrent dans un 
petit espace Fexercice de la bienf aisance ? Et qu'im- 
porte qu'un homme soit ne en deca ou en dela d'un 
detroit, en est-il moins un homme? n'a-t-il pas les 
memes besoms? n'est-il pas expose aux memes peines, 
avide du meme bonheur? Fais done pour lui tout ce 
qu'il est en droit d'attendre de toi sur une infinite de 
rapports immuables, eternels, et independants de 
toutes les conventions. Je trouve Polifeme plus ex- 
cusable d'avoir mange les compagnons d'Ulisse, que 
la plupart de ces petits Europeens, qui n'ont que 
cinq pieds et demi, et deux yeux, qui se ressemblent 
en tout, et qui ne s'en devorent pas moins. Mon 
cber David, vous etes de toutes les nations, et vous 
ne demanderez jamais au malheureux son extrait 
baptistaire. Je me flatte d'etre, comme vous, citoyen 
de la grande ville du monde. Mais treve de philoso- 
phic. Trouvez un trou a M. de Neufville. Cherchez 
a sa femme quelque niche ou elle puisse travailler, 
s'occuper, subsister, faire subsister son enfant, et 
secourir son mari. Je vous le repete, j'y prends 
interet. Si vous revenez jamais parmi nous, je vous 
presenterai a Mad e Diderot qui joint ses remerci- 
ments aux miens, et qui vous baisera sur vos deux 
larges joues Bernardines. Vos commergants avec 
leur secret de commerce me font mourir de rire. 
Vous verrez qu'un particulier leur fera un dommage 
qu'il n'est pas au pouvoir de toute une nation 
ennemie de leur faire; 5 et puis ne faut-il faire aucun 

5 It is probable that London business men had refused 
to give work to M. de Neufville on account of his foreign 
nationality. 



468 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

fond sur la probite d'un homme qu'on tire de la 
misere, et a qui Ton a donne du pain sur la garantie 
de deux honnetes gens? Je vous fais men compli- 
ment sur la cessation de vos fonctions publiques. 8 
Revenez, revenez vite, mon cher philosophe, a vos 
livres — a vos occupations. Je vous aime bien mieux 
le fouet a la main, faisant justice de tous les celebres 
brigands qui ont trouble votre contree, brisant une 
statue, en elevant une autre, qu' expose a partager 
les forfaits des rois et de leurs ministres. Continuez 
votre histoire — ne la continuez pas. 7 Sondez les 
replis du coeur humain en moraliste. Examinez les 
ressorts delies de son entendement en subtil meta- 
physicien. Faites tout ce qu'il vous plaira — quelque 
chose que vous fassiez, vous servirez votre espece en 
general, ce qui est bien plus digne de vous que de 
n'en servir qu r une bien petite portion. II est peut- 
etre tres possible d'etre un bon citoyen, sans etre un 
fort mechant homme: n'allez pas prendre un en- 
gourdissement momentane pour une perclusion. II 
est vrai que j'ai toujours conserve l'amour du travail; 
mais cet amour est devenu infruetueux par des dis- 
tractions continues auxquelles la bonte de mon ame 
ne m'a jamais permis, et ne me permettra jamais, de 
me refuser. Je ne sais si j'ai tort, mais le temps 
me parait mieux employe pour un autre qui me le 

'Hume's connection with the Home Office ceased in 
1767. 

7 J. H. Burton found this passage obscure. Diderot 
evidently means that either as a historian, or as a 
moralist, or as a metaphysician, Hume cannot fail to 
11 serve his species. " 



LETTERS 469 

demande que pour moi. J'aurai toujours le temps 
d'ecrire, et je saisis avec empressement le moment de 
bien faire. Mais, mon cher David, je ne pense pas a 
l'homme de la philosophic. Je me suis precipite dans 
des questions abstruses d'un genre tout different, et je 
voudrais bien m'en tirer. J'aime les occupations qui 
ne compromettent pas le repos. II faut craindre les 
derniers mouvements convulsifs d'un animal feroce 
blesse a mort. 9 J'ai vu une fois en ma vie, le dernier 
effort de la jambe d'un chevreuil casser la jambe du 
chasseur qui l'avait tire. Le fanatisme aux abois est 
bien une autre bete. Vous croyez notre intolerance 
plus favorable aux progres de l'opinion humaine que 
votre liberte presqu* illimitee. Cela se peut. Les 
D'Holbach, Helvetius, Morellet, Suard, qui ne sont 
pas tout a fait de votre avis, du moins a en juger par 
leurs discours et leurs ecrits, n'en sont pas moins 
sensibles a votre souvenir. Si vous nous regrettez 
aussi sincerement que vous l'etes de nous, venez nous 
re voir. Que faites-vous de Jean- Jacques? On dit 
qu'il nous quitte pour aller a Londres faire imprimer 
ses memoires. Si cet ouvrage est court, il sera mau- 
vais. Plus il aura de volumes, moins il parlera de 
lui; meilleur il sera. Je redoute le moment ou un 
homme qui aime tant le bruit, qui connait si peu les 
egards, qui a ete lie si intimement avec une infinite 
de gens, publiera un pareil ouvrage, surtout avec 
Fart qu'il a de fletrir adroitement, d'obscurcir, 
d'alterer, de faire suspecter plus encore en louant 

9 Compare a similar passage in Lettres a Falconet ; 
(Euvres Completes, XVII, 265. 



470 DIDEKOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

qu'en blamant. 10 Ne convenez-vous pas, mon cher phi- 
losophe, que c'est dans une pareille circonstance qu'il 
est infiniment doux de n' avoir rendu son ami infidele 
que le temoin d'actions justes et de discours hon- 
netes? Les mechants se rejouissent de la mort de 
leurs amis, ce sont des complices qui pourraient 
etre indiscrets, et dont ils sont debarrasses. Les 
honnetes gens s'affligent de la mort des leurs, ce sont 
des panegyristes qui leur echappent. 

Vivez longtemps pour nous; nous tacherons de 
vous conserver le plus longtemps que nous pourrons, 
nous dont vous savez bien que l'eloge ne vous man- 
quera pas. Je vous salue et vous embrasse de tout 
mon coeur. Servez M. et Mad e de Neufville, je vous 
en conjure; et me croyez entierement votre tres 
obeissant serviteur. 



Monsieur et cber Philosopbe, — On n'a rien pour 
rien dans ce monde; il faut payer ses vices — il faut 
payer ses vertus; et n'allez pas vous imaginer que 
vous jouirez gratuitement de la plus grande con- 
sideration. On voudra vous voir — on voudra se 
vanter de vous avoir vu. Ayez done la bonte d'ouvrir 
votre porte, et d'ofrrir votre face ronde et riante de 
Bernardin a un jeune Pensylvain qui a jure de ne 
pas repasser les mers sans vous avoir rendu son 

10 Sir Samuel Komilly was also told by Diderot how 
much he dreaded the publication of Eousseau 's Con- 
fessions; see above p. 114. But here, as in his Essay on 
Claudius and Nero, Diderot shows that he had no great 
reasons to fear for himself personally. 



LETTERS 471 

homniage. Ne trouverez-vous pas fort etrange que ce 
soit un Francais qui vous adresse un de vos com- 
patriotes? C'est que tout est sans dessus dessous 
dans ce moment-ei. Le Roi de France se jette sur 
les possessions du pape; le Turc veut mettre la paix 
entre ces chiens de Chretiens qui se dechirent. 11 Nous 
ecrivons contre le despotisme; et il nous vient des 
pamphlets de Londres en f aveur de la tyrannic Ah, 
mon cher philosophe! pleurons et gemissons sur le 
sort de la philosophic Nous prechons la sagesse a 
des sourds, et nous sommes encore bien loin du siecle 
de la raison. Nous sommes meme infectes ici d'une 
secte de Machiavelistes qui pretendent que ce siecle 
ne viendra jamais. Cela serait bien capable de 
resoudre a prendre son bonnet de nuit, a poser molle- 
ment sa tete sur un oreiller, et a laisser aller le 
monde a sa fantaisic Qu'en dites-vous? Quoi qu'il 
en soit, recevez gracieusement mon jeune Pensylvain. 
Donnez-lui de bons conseils. Surtout persuadez-lui 
de mitiger son bel enthousiasme pour les progres de 
la medecinc S'il vous presente sa dissertation in- 
augurate, vous y lirez que ce jeune homme a fait des 
experiences dangereuses sur lui-meme. 12 II ne faut 
pas se tuer pour apprendre a guerir les autres; 
d'autant plus que le bien qu'on se promet de leur 
faire est tres incertain, et que le mal qu'on se fait a 
soi-meme est tres sur. N'allez pas etayer votre 

11 The Turks declared war on Russia in 1768, when the 
first partition of Poland was considered. 

12 We have not been able to find more particulars con- 
cerning this young doctor from Pennsylvania. 



472 DIDEROT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

paresse de cette maxime: nous n'aurions plus rien de 
vous, et ce serait grand dommage. Les bonnes tetes 
sont si rares, qu'il n'est pas permis a celles qui sont 
bonnes d'etre oisives. Je vous salue, — je vous aime, — 
je vous revere — et suis avec ces sentiments pour toute 
ma vie, monsieur etcher philosophe, votre tres humble 
et tres obeissant serviteur. 
A Paris, ce 17 mars 1769. 

C. An Unpublished Letter from Diderot to 
Bret 

(The following letter, to which we alluded above, 
p. 293, was copied by us from the original in the 
British Museum, Egerton MSS. 19. The spelling is 
modernized.) 

A Monsieur Bret 14 
Monsieur, 

Le plan de ma piece est reste tel que vous savez. 
La premiere m'avait donne tant de tracasseries que 
j'ai ete vingt fois sur le point d'abandonner la seconde 
et de jeter au feu ce que j'en avais fait. Mes amis 
m'en ont empeche. Je Pad reprise. J'y ai un peu 
travaille, mais si peu que ce n'est pas la peine de 
dire. Je ne prevois pas qu'on puisse Pimprimer de 

"Antoine Bret (1717-1792). The two plays discussed 
in this letter seem to be Bret's Le Jaloux, which was 
never performed, and Diderot's Fils Naturel, which have 
one "incident de Hen" in common: a man suspects his 
friend of having paid addresses to a lady whom he him- 
self loves. 



LETTERS 473 

deux mois; Pimpression en prendra bien un encore. 
D'ici a trois mois, je crois que vous aurez ete repre- 
sente, applaudi, et lu. Je n'en prends nulle inquie- 
tude. Vous reussirez siirement, et ce ne seront pas 
des petites nuances de rien qui empecheront que je 
n'aie aussi du succes, nos genres etant si differents. 
J'y ai pense, et j'y ai bien pense. Ce que nous avons 
de conforme est un petit incident de rien. Aussi, 
Monsieur, allez votre chemin. Je sens toute la poli- 
tesse de ce que vous m'ecrivez, et je n'en accepte a 
la lettre que ce que vous me dites des qualites de mon 
ame. Quelque opinion que vous en ayez, j'espere 
que vous ne la verrez jamais au-dessous de ce que 
[vous] en aurez pense. Je vous salue, vous embrasse 
de tout mon coeur, et vous prie de me compter parmi 
vos amis : c'est vous en dire assez. 

Si je parais le dernier, et qu'a la lecture de votre 
ouvrage je trouve que nous nous sommes rencontres 
plus que je ne crois, je vous rendrai justice, et je me 
la rendrai a moi-meme. Si je vous precede, vous en 
ferez de meme, et je serai content. Ah, mon ami, 
soyez sur qu'il est impossible a d'honnetes gens de 
se donner en pareil cas le moindre petit chagrin; et 
nous sommes, je crois, d'honnetes gens. Au reste, 
mon cher, ce que vous dites de la facilite que je pour- 
rais avoir de retourner mon plan, n'est pas tout a, 
fait comme vous l'imaginez. Ce plan est cousu de 
maniere, cette charpente assemblee de facon que je 
n'en peux pas arracher un point, deplacer une che- 
ville que tout ne se renverse. Je vous salue et vous 



474 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

embrasse derechef, et je suis pour vous avec tous les 
sentiments que vous avez pour moi, 
Monsieur, 

Votre tres humble 
et tres oblige serviteur, 
Diderot. 
ce 29 9bre 1753. 
Je vous confie ou j'en suis de mon ouvrage et le temps 
ou je erois qu'il pourra paraitre; e'est a vous seul 
que je fais cette confidence; et j'exige de vous [de] 
n'en dire rien a personne; ce sont deux circonstances 
qui, je crois, ne vous importent en rien. 

Mais pourquoi m'ecrire? Vous avez du plaisir a 
me voir; j'en ai de mon cote; pourquoi diable ne 
pas venir? — 

D. Letters from Diderot to John Wilkes 

M. M. Tourneux has published two letters from 
Diderot to Wilkes: one in the (Euvres Completes, 
XIX, 498, from the English translation given by 
John Almon in The Correspondence of the late John 
Wilkes with his friends, printed from the original 
MSS. . . ., London, 1805, vol. V, p. 243;— the other 
in his Diderot et Catherine II, Paris, 1899, pp. 389- 
390. 

We reprint here, with two slight corrections, the 
second of these letters as our No. 1; Nos. 2, 3 and 
4 have not hitherto been published. We copied these 
four letters from Addit. MSS. 30.877, ft. 81, 83, 
85, 87, in the British Museum. The spelling is 
modernized.) 



LETTERS 475 



A Wilkes 



Monsieur et tres honore Gracchus, avez-vous vu 
mon ami Grimm ? Avez-vous bu la sante de vos amis 
de Paris? Je crois que non. Attache a un prince, 
il lui aura ete difficile d'approcher sa levre de la 
coupe seditieuse d'un tribun du peuple. Que faites- 
vous a Londres a present? Vous qui savez si bien 
reveiller dans les ames le demon patriotique, que 
n'etes-vous ici? L'honune qui sait susciter de grands 
mouvements aime a etre le spectateur de grandes 
revolutions. II n'y a que deux instants interessants 
dans la duree des empires, celui de leur grandeur et 
celui de leur decadence, surtout lorsque cette deca- 
dence nait de petites causes imprevues et s'accelere 
avec une grande rapidite. Imaginez un palais im- 
mense dont Paspect majestueux et solide vous en 
imposait, promettait a votre imagination une duree 
eternelle ; imaginez ensuite que ses f ondements s'ebran- 
lent et que vous voyiez tout a coup ses murs enormes 
se separer et se disjoindre. Voila precisement le 
spectacle que nous offririons a votre speculation. 
Alors les beaux-arts se sauvent de chez un peuple, 
comme on voit par un instinct divin les rats sortir 
d'une maison qui menace mine. Le philosophe, 
moins sage que l'habitant a museau pointu et a 
longue queue, reste jusqu'a ce qu'un moellon de Tedi- 
fice lui casse la tete. M Uc Biheron 15 qui vous remettra 

15 See the notice on this lady in M. Tourneiix, Diderot 
et Catherine II, pp. 390-391. 



476 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

ce billet extravagant est une souris effarouchee qui 
sort de son trou et qui va ehercher chez vous de la 
securite. Cette souris est une souris distinguee dans 
son espece. Elle justifiera la consideration dont elle 
jouit ici, par une quantite de tres beaux ouvrages. 
Ce sont des precis anatomiques d'une verite et d'une 
exactitude 16 merveilleuses. Je vous prie de l'accueillir 
et de lui rendre tous les bons offices qui dependront 
de vous. Ma fille a fait avec faeilite et sans degout 
un cours d'anatomie chez elle. Si vous m'en croyez, 
vous engagerez Mademoiselle Wilkes a prendre quel- 
ques-unes de ses lecons. Quoique ce ne soit point 
Fobjet du voyage de Mademoiselle Biheron, comme 
elle joint a ses connaissances un grand caractere de 
bienfaisance, je ne doute point qu'elle ne se fit un 
plaisir de vous obliger dans votre enfant. Je pre- 
sente mon respect a Mademoiselle Wilkes. Je vous 
embrasse, vous, de tqut mon coeur, quoique vous 
soyez un grand vaurien; mais je ne sais comment 
cela s'est fait: toute ma vie j'ai eu et j'aurai un 
faible pour les vauriens, tels que vous s'entend. 

Votre tres humble, tres obeissant serviteur et un 
peu vaurien aussi. 

Diderot. 

Ce 19 octobrel771. 

2 

Monsieur et tres honore Alderman, Je vous ai 
adresse Mademoiselle Biheron, femme distinguee par 

16 " Exactitude, ' ' instead of l f6tude , ' , (as printed by 
M. Tourneux) ; and above, l ' disjoindre ' ' instead of 
1 * dissoudre. ' ' 



LETTERS 477 

son merite anatomique; je vous adresse aujourd'hui 
Monsieur Pasquier, 17 peintre en portrait de notre 
Academic C'est un habile homme, qui merite par 
la douceur de son caractere et par son talent que 
vous le favorisiez. Favorisez-le done. Ah, mon cher 
politique, les sciences et les arts nous quittent. Si 
leur naissance montre un peuple qui sort de la bar- 
barie; leur progres, un peuple qui s'achemine a la 
grandeur; leur splendeur, un peuple eclaire, puissant 
et florissant; leur mepris, leur indigence et leur de- 
gradation doivent marquer un peuple qui descend et 
qui s'en retourne a la stupidite et a la misere. On 
me demandait un jour comment on rendait la vigueur 
a une nation qui Favait perdue; je repondis, comme 
Medee rendit la jeunesse a son pere; en le depeeant 
et en le faisant bouillir. Je vous salue et vous 
embrasse de tout mon coeur. Favorisez Monsieur 
Pasquier, et comptez-moi au nombre de vos amis. 

Diderot. 

Mon tres humble respect a Mad lle Wilkes. 

Ce 14 9bre 1771. 

3 

Ami Wilkes, vous vous etes bien trouve jusqu'a 
present de tous ceux que je vous ai adresses. lis 
etaient tous dignes de vous connaitre et d'etre connus 
de vous. Monsieur le Baron de Clingstad ne fera 
pas exception. C'est un homme egalement recom- 

11 Pierre Pasquier (1731-1806), had exhibited a por- 
trait of Diderot in enamel, at the Salon of 1769, and 
other portraits in the Salon of 1771. See XI, 449, 507; 
XII, 46. 



478 DIDEBOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

mandable par la bonte, la franchise et la douceur 
de son caractere, et par son esprit et ses lumieres. 
Accueillez-le done comme j'accueillerais celui qui vous 
honorerait de son amitie. Monsieur le Baron de 
Klingstad m'honore de la sienne. II est attache a une 
souveraine, ma bienf aitrice, et nous aurions une haute 
opinion de la cour de Petersbourg, si Pimperatrice 
etait entouree d'un grand nombre de pareils servi- 
teurs. Bonjour, mon digne et tres aime Wilkes. 
Mad lle Biheron se loue infiniment de vous. Je vous 
salue et vous embrasse de tout mon cceur. 

Diderot. 
A Paris, ce 10 juil. 1772. 



Ami Wilkes, que faites-vous? Si vous vous re- 
posez, vous etes bien a plaindre. J'ai lu avec une 
grande satisfaction les differents diseours que vous 
avez prononces, sur Faff aire des provinciaux. 19 Je 
les ai trouves pleins d'eloquence, de dignite et de 
force. J'en ai aussi fait un, et le voici : " Messieurs, 
je ne vous parlerai point de la justice ou de Pin- 
justice de votre conduite. Je sais bien que ce mot 
n'est que du bruit, quand il s'agit de Finteret general. 
Je pourrais vous parler de vos moyens de reussir, 
et vous demander si vous etes assez forts pour jouer 
le role d'oppresseurs ; cele toucherait un peu de plus 
pres a la question. Cependant je n'en ferai rien. 
Mais je m ? en tiendrai a vous supplier de jeter les 
yeux sur les nations qui vous haissent; interrogez- 

19 The American provincials. 



LETTERS 479 

les; voyez ee qu'elles pensent de vous, et dites-moi 
jusques a quand vous avez resolu de faire rire vos 
ennemis." 

II parait iei un papier qu'on dit etre d'un homme 
important de votre nation; il parait par ce papier 
que le pro jet secret de la mere-patrie est de faire 
egorger la moitie des colons, et de reduire le reste 
a, la condition des negres. 

En effet, cela leverait toute difficulte pour le pre- 
sent et pour Pavenir. 

Au milieu du tumulte public, portez-vous bien; 
soyez gai; buvez de bons vins; et lorsqu'il vous pren- 
dra fantaisie d'etre tendre, adressez-vous a des fem- 
mes qui ne fassent pas soupirer longtemps. Elles 
amusent autant que les autres; elles occupent moins; 
on les possede sans inquietude, et on les quitte sans 
regret. 

C'est un jeune homme tres sage qui vous remettra 
ces sottises. S'il n'etait que cela, je ne vous l'adres- 
serais pas; mais il est tres aimable, et tres instruit. 
C'est un ami de Monsieur Suard, et c'est un des 
miens. 

Je presente mon respect a Mademoiselle Wilkes, 
et je vous prie de me croire tou jours avec les 
memes sentiments 

Votre tres humble et tres obeiss* 
serviteur et ami 

Diderot. 

(Received at London June 25, 1776). 



APPENDIX II 

A Chronological Table of Diderot's Main Works 

Most of Diderot's works having been printed post- 
humously, it has been thought advisable to give here 
the dates of publication of his most important writ- 
ings, together with the probable dates of composition. 
A similar table will be found in the excellent Ex- 
traits de Diderot by the late Joseph Texte (Paris, 
4th edition, 1909), and a complete chronology in M. 
G. Lanson's Manuel bibliographique de la litterature 
frangaise moderne, 1500-1900 (Part III, Chap. XI), 
For full discussions of the dates of composition, we 
refer to the Notices preliminaires prefixed to each 
work in the Assezat-Tourneux edition of Diderot. 

Posthumous works are in italics. 

Composition. Publication. 

1745 Principes de philosophie morale ou 

Essai sur le merite et la vertu, par 
Mylord S * * *, traduit de l'anglais.. 1745 

1746 Pensees philosophiques 1746 

1747 La Promenade du sceptique, ou Les 

Allies 1830 

1747 De la Suffisance de la religion naturelle. 1770 

1748 Les Bijoux indiscrets 1748 

1749 Lettre sur les aveugles a l'usage de ceux 

qui voient 1749 

1750 Prospectus de PEncyclopedie 1750 

1746-1751 Encyclopedic, tome I 1751 

Encyclopedic, tome II 1752 

480 



TABLE OF DIDEROT'S MAIN WORKS 481 

1752-1757 Encyclopedie, tomes III-VII. 1753-1757 
1759-1765 Encyclopedie, tomes VIII-XVIL. . 1765 
Encyclopedie, Planches, tomes I-V. 1765 
Encyclopedie, Planches, tomes VI- 

XI 1772 

1765-1777 Encyclopedie, Supplements, tomes 

I-V 1777 

1751 Recherches philosophiques sur l'origine et 

la nature du beau (article "Beau"). 1751 

1751 Lettre sur les sourds et muets a l'usage 

de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent . . 1751 

1752 Suite de PApologie de M. l'abbe de Prades 

en reponse a l'instruction pastorale de 

Mgr l'eveque d'Auxerre 1752 

1754 Pensees sur Interpretation de la nature. 1754 
1753 (?) -1757 Le Fils Naturel ou Les epreuves 

de la vertu 1757 

1758 Le Pere de famille 1758 

1759 Salon de 1759 1813 

1761 Salon de 1761 1819 

1763 Salon de 1763 1857 

1765 Salon de 1765; — Essai sur la peinture. 1795 

1767 Salon de 1767 1798 

1769 Salon de 1769 1819 

1771 Salon de 1771 1857 

1775 Salon de 1775 1857 

1781 Salon de 1781 1857 

1759-1774 Lettres a Mile Volland 1830 

1760 Le Joueur, drame imite de Vanglais .... 1819 
1760 La Beligieuse 1796 

32 



482 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

1760 (?) -1773 Jacques le Fataliste et son 

maitre 1796 

1761 Eloge de Richardson 1762 

1762 Reflexions sur Terence 1762 

1762-1773 Le Neveu de Bameau, satire. Ger- 
man translation by Goethe, 1805; 

— translated from the German, 
by De Saur, 1821; — publ. from a 
copy, 1821; — from another copy, 
1875;— from the MS, by M. 

Monval 1891 

1765-1769 Lettres a Mile Jodin 1821 

1766-1773 Lettres a Falconet (Thirteen 

letters in) 1831 
1767 Lettre Jiistorique et politique sur le com- 
merce de la librairie 1861 

1769 Entretien entre D'Alembert et Diderot. 

Le Reve de D'Alembert. Suite de 

V entretien 1830 

1770 Les deux amis de Bourbonne 1773 

1772 Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre. 1772 

1772 Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville 

ou Dialogue entre A. et B. sur Vincon- 
venient d' attacker des idees morales a, 
certaines actions physiques qui n'en 

comportent pas 1796 

1773-1778 Paradoxe sur le comedien 1830 

1773 Entretien d'un pere avec ses enfants, ou 

Du danger de se mettre au-dessus des 

lois 1773 



TABLE OF DIDEKOT'S MAIN WORKS 483 

1773-1774 Refutation suivie de Vouvrage 

d'Helvetius intitule L'Homme . . 1875 
1775-1776 Plan d'une Universite pour le gou- 

vernement de Russie 1813-1814 

(complete) 1875 
1776 Entretien d'un philosophe avec la Mare- 

chale de * * * 1776 

1778 Essai sur la vie de Seneque le philosophe, 
sur ses ecrits, et sur les regnes de 

Claude et de Neron 1778 

(Second edition, much enlarged) 1782 
1781 Est-il bon? est-il meehant? 1834 



APPENDIX III 



Bibliographical Note 



This is not a complete bibliography of Diderot, but 
only a list of the principal works that have been 
used in the preparation of the foregoing study of 
Diderot's relationship to English thought. 

For full bibliographical information concerning 
Diderot, we again refer to M. Gr. Lanson's Manuel 
bibliographique de la litter attire frangaise modeme, 
1500-1900, Part III (Dix-huitieme siecle), Chap. XI. 
— See also in vol. XX of Diderot's (Euvres Com- 
pletes, pp. 141-147, a list of the main writings con- 
cerning the person and the works of Diderot up to 
1877, by M. Maurice Tourneux; and J. J. C. 
L(eyds), Principaux ecrits relatifs a la personne et 
aux ozuvres, au temps et a Vinfluence de Diderot, Paris 
and Amsterdam, 1887. 

For the biographical and critical works concerning 
the English writers who are mentioned below, we 
refer to the Index. 

, I. Diderot 
(a) Works 
(Euvres completes de Diderot, edited by J. Assezat 
(as far as vol. XVII) and M. Tourneux, Paris, 
1875-1877, 20 vols, 8vo. 
Correspondance litteraire (1753-1790) de Grimm 
(also partly by Diderot, Madame d'Epinay and 
Meister), edited by M. Tourneux, Paris, 1877- 
1882, 16 vols 8vo. 

484 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 485 

M. Tourneux. Diderot et Catherine II (containing 
unpublished fragments), Paris, 1899, 8vo. 

(b) Biography 

Madame de Vandeul (Diderot's daughter). Me- 
moir es sur Diderot (1787), reprinted in vol. I 
of the Assezat-Tourneux edition. 

Naigeon. Memoires historiques et philosophiques sur 
M. Diderot, Paris, 1821, 2 vols. 

(c) Biographical Criticism 

K. Rosenkranz. Diderot's Leben und Werke, Leip- 
zig, 1866, 2 vols 8vo. 
Avezac-Lavigne. Diderot et la societe du baron 

d'Holbach, etude surie-dix-huitieme siecle (1713- 

1789), Paris, 1875, 8vo. 
John Morley. Diderot and the Encyclopedists, 

London, 1878, 2 vols 8vo (2d edition 1S86, repr. 

1891, 1897, 1905; — references are made to the 

1905 reprint). 
E. Scherer. Diderot, etude, Paris, 1880, 8vo. 
L. Ducros. Diderot, Vhomme et Vecrivain, Paris, 

1894, in-12. 
J. Reinach. Diderot, Paris, 1894, in-16. 
A. Collignon. Diderot, sa vie, ses oeuvres, sa corre- 

spondance, Paris, 1895, in-18. 

(c) Criticism 

Sainte-Beuve. Portraits litteraires, Paris, 1862-1864, 
3 vols 8vo; vol. I (article written in 1831). 



486 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

And Causeries du lundi, Paris, 1851-1862, 15 

vols 8vo (article written in 1851). 
Carlyle. Essays, in Works, London, 1885-1888, 17 

vols 8vo; vol. XVII (article written in 1833). 
E. Bersot. Etudes sur le XVIII e siecle, Paris, 1855, 

2 vols 8vo; vol. I. 
H. Hettner. Literaturgeschichte des XVIII Jahr- 

hunderts, 1856, — the 5th edition Braunschweig, 

1894, 2 vols 8vo; vol. II. 
Ph. Damiron. Memoires pour servir a Vhistoire de 

la philosophie au dix-huitieme siecle, Paris, 1858, 

8vo; vol. I. 
J. Barni. Histoire des idees morales et politiques 

en France au dix-huitieme siecle, Paris, 1858, 

8vo; vol. I. 

E. Caro. La fin du dix-huitieme siecle, Paris, 1880, 

8vo; vol. I. 

F. Brunetiere. Etudes critiques sur Vhistoire de la 

litterature frangaise, Paris, 1880-1907, 8vo., vol. 
II. 
E. Faguet. Dix-huitieme siecle, Etudes litteraires, 
Paris, 1890, in-18. 

II. English Writers 

Bacon. Francisci Baconi . . . opera omnia (the first 
collected edition), edited by John Blackbourne, 
London, 1730, 4 vols fol. (Diderot used the 
Amsterdam edition, Wm. Rawley, 1662, in-32, of 
the De Augmentis; see above, p. 243). 

The Works of Francis Bacon . . . , collected and 
edited by James Spedding, R. L. Ellis, D. D. 



BIBLIOGEAPHICAL NOTE 487 

Heath, Boston, 1860-1864 (American edition), 
15 vols in-12. Philosophical Works, I-VII. 

Shaftesbury. Characteristics, London, 1737 (5th edi- 
tion), 3 vols (for A Notion of the Historical 
Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Her- 
cules, according to Prodicus, and A Letter con- 
cerning the Art or Science of Design, not in- 
cluded in the following). 

Characteristics, edited by J. M. Robertson, London, 
1900, 2 vols 8vo (a critical reprint of the first 
edition, 1711). 

Locke. An Essay concerning Human Understanding, 
London, 1760 (15th edition), 2 vols 4to. 

Nicholas Saunderson. The Elements of Algebra, 
Cambridge, 1740, 2 vols 8vo. 

Robert James. A Medicinal Dictionary . . . , Lon- 
don, 1743-1745, 3 vols fol. 

John Harris. Lexicum Technicum, or an Universal 
English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences . . . , 
London, 1704 (vol. I), 1710 (vol. II), 2 vols fol. 

Ephraim Chambers. Cyclopcedia, or an Universal 
Dictionary of Arts and Sciences . . . , London, 
1728, 2 vols fol. 

A Supplement to Dr. Harris's Dictionary of Arts 
and Sciences . . . , by a Society of Gentlemen, 
London, 1744, fol. 

George Lillo. The London Merchant and Fatal 
Curiosity, edited by A. W. Ward (The Belles- 
Lettres Series), Boston, 1906 (American edition). 

Edward Moore. The Gamester, London, 1753, in-12. 



488 DIDEEOT AND ENGLISH THOUGHT 

Richardson. The Works of Samuel Richardson, 
with a prefatory chapter of biographical criti- 
cism by Leslie Stephen, London, 1883, 12 vols 
8vo (Pamela, I-III; Clarissa Harlow e, IV- 
VIII; Sir Charles Grandison, IX-XII). 

Laurence Sterne. The Life and Opinions of Tris- 
tram Shandy, Gentleman, edited by G. Saints- 
bury, London, 1900, 3 vols in-16. 

John Hawkesworth. An Account of the voyages 
undertaken by order of His present Majesty for 
making discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, 
and successfully performed by Commodore 
Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain Carteret, and 
Captain Cook, in the Dolphin, the Swallow, and 
the Endeavour, London, 1773, 3 vols 4to. 

Joseph Spence. Polymetis, or an Enquiry concern- 
ing the agreement between the works of the 
Roman poets and the remains of the ancient 
artists, being an attempt to illustrate them mutu- 
ally from one another, London, 1747. 

William Hogarth. Analysis of Beauty, written with 
a view of fixing the fluctuating Ideas of Taste, 
London, 1753, 4to. 

Daniel Webb. An Inquiry into the Beauties of 
Painting, and into the merits of the most cele- 
brated painters, London, 1760, — 2d edit., 1761, 
in-12. 

The Annual Register, or a View of the History, 
Politicks, and Literature of the year 1762 (vol. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 489 

V of the series), — also the other volumes, pas- 
sim, from 1758 to 1784, London, 1758 and ff., 
8vo. 
The Gentleman's Magazine, years 1739 (Saunderson), 
1749 (Diderot's mathematical Memoirs), and 
1780 (Thomas Hope), London, 1731 ff., 8vo. 



: 



INDEX 



Figures in italics refer to footnotes 

Adam, Ch., 177, 182, 186, 192. Babbitt, Irving, 1,01. 

Adams, John, 7. Bachelier, 205. 

Addison, 302, 463. Bacon, F., 43, 75, 127, 139, 

Agasias, 430. 171, 173, 176, Jf77, 180, 182, 

Albergati Capacelli, Marquis, 183, 186, 192, 193 ff., 206, 

87. 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 

Alembert, D', 77, 99, 105, 113, 238, 243, 2$, 244 ff., 255, 

Ilk, 160, 182, 186, 188, 190, 258, 277, 296, 395, 450, 

191, 192, 210, 211, 215, 220, 452, 460, tfO, 486. 

223, 241, 243, 244, 254, Baillet, 228. 

280, 284, 310, S58, 359, 456, Baldensperger, F., 3, 3. 

482. Baldwin, C. S., 376, 378. 

Alibard, Abbe d', 109, 202. Ballantyne, k- 

Almon, J., 474. Barante, De, 2. 

Alsted, 27, 226, 227. Barbeu du Bourg, 109. 

Ampere, 203. Barclay, 150. 

Andre\ Pere, 403, 404. Barni, J., 486. 

Annual Register, 281, 282, 391, Barocci, 1,16, 419. 

488. Barton, F. B., 95, 372, 375, 388. 

Anquetil du Perron, 281, 282. Basnage, 283. 

Anseaume, 309. Batteux, Abbe\ 404, 423. 

Anson, 391. Bayle, hi, 44, 150, 228, 229, 

Architas, 216. 237, 238, 257, 261, 272, 

Argenson, Comte d\ 154. 272, 280, 283, 285, 395. 

Argenson, Marquis d', 28, 28, Bayon, Mile, 100. 

60, 155. Beaumarchais, 301. 

Aristotle, 21, 175, 185, 200, Beaumont, F., 306. 

226, 300, 301, 336. Beccari, 213. 

Arnaud, Abb6 d', 335. Becket, 95, 96. 

Asgil, 128. Bemetzrieder, 191, 408. 

AssSzat, J., 15, 282, 293, 311, Bentham, 124. 

37^ 375, m, iS2, 484. Bergier, 413. 

Atterbury, 33. Berkeley, 157, 173, 177, 278. 

Audran, 248. Bernbaum, E., 293, 302. 

Augustine, St., 138, 404. Bernini, 420. 

Avezac-Lavigne, 485. Berruyer, 145. 
490 



INDEX 



491 



Bersot, E., W, 486. 

Berthier, Pere, 245. 

Bigot, 272, 272. 

Biheron, Mile, 108, 109, 110, 

475, 476, 478. 
Bissy, Comte de, 372. 
Blackbourne, J., 19$, 486. 
Blair, Dr, 105. 
Blakey, N., 188, 188. 
Blanchard, 230. 
Bocage, Mme du, 99, 318. 
Bochartus, 272. 
Boerhave, 245. 
Boileau, 399, 415. 
Boldero, J., 157. 
Bolingbroke, 4, k, 33, 115, 119, 

124, 149, 150, 150, 151, 152. 
Bonnay, Marquis de, 372. 
Bonnet, 207, 220, 221. 
Bordeu, Dr, 215, 218. 
Bossuet, 273. 
Beswell, 99, 108, 112, J3i. 
Boucher, 410, 424, 443. 
Boufflers, Mme de, 80. 
Bougainville, 34, 134, 159, 282, 

390 ff., 482. 
Bouhours, 399. 
Boyle, 176. 
Bret, A., 293, 472 ff. 
Brucker, 27, 229, 238, 241, 

257, 270 ff., 282, 283. 
Brunetiere, F., 5, 41, 295, 395, 
. 396, 396, 456, *56, 458, 486 
Brut6 de Loirelle, Abbe, 310. 
Buckle, H. T., 1, 2, 8, 8, 9, 10. 
Button, 33, 98, 105, 207, 220, 

221, 222, 223. 
Burke, E., 67, 110, 110, HI, 

115. 
Burnet, 273. 
Burney, Chas., 192. 
Burton, J. H., 59, 105, 464 ff. 
Byron, Commodore, 390, 391, 

488. 



Cabanis, 279. 

Caesar, 145. 

Calvin, 150. 

Caracci, Hannibal, 419. 

Carlyle, 458, 486. 

Caro, E., 178, 213, 486. 

Carteret, Capt., 390, 391, 488. 

Castellus, 230. 

Catherine II, 55, 67, 78, 109, 

179, 279, 474, £75, 485. 
Caylus, Comte de, 205. 
Chambers, Ephraim, 38, 64, 

231 ff., 238, 242 ff., 256, 

257, 258, 259 ff., 282, 283, 

487. 
Chardin, 410, 413, 414, 423, 

427. 
Charron, 347. 
Chastellux, Chevalier de, 430, 

458. 
Chateaubriand, 421. 
Chaucer, 5, 95. 
Chaudon, Abbe\ 4S8. 
Chauvin, 229, 234. 
Chaux, Mile de la, 105, 379, 

389. 
Cheselden, 155. 
Chesterfield, Lord, 156. 
Cibber, 95, 302. 
Cicero, 126, 138, 226. 
Clairon, Mile, 292. 
Clarke, 153, 153, 166, 167, 

173. 
Clement, P., 304. 
Clingstad (see Klingstad). 
Cobbett, Wm., 258. 
Coetlogon, Chevalier Denis, 

235. 
Colbert, 247. 
Collier, Jeremy, 302. 
Collignon, A., 485. 
Collins, 115. 
Collins, Churton, 4, I 
Comenius, 273. 



492 



INDEX 



Comte, Auguste, 169, 170, 180, 

254. 
Condillac, 279. 
Condorcet, 182. 
Congreve, 463. 
Conti, Prince de, 80. 
Cook, Capt., 390, 391, 391, 392, 

488. 
Corneille, P., 5, 141, 288, 300, 

301, 302, 303, 307, 316, 415, 

421, 437. 
Corneille, Thomas, 229. 
Coronelli, V. M., 237. 
Correggio, 419. 
Cowley, 264. 
Croismare, M. de, 358. 
Cross, W. L., 95. 
Crousaz, 403, 404. 
Cushing, Mary G., U9. 
Cyril, 276. 
Czernischew, 52. 

Damilaville, 341. 

Damiron, Ph., 486. 

Darwin, Chas., 219, 220, 222, 

223. 
Darwin, Erasmus, 221, 222. 
Dashkoff, Princess, 52, 79, 80. 
Davies, R., 158. 
Dedieu, J., 3. 

Deffand, Mme du, 77, 78, 110. 
Denis, Mme, $8. 
Derham, 189. 
De Saur, 482. 
Descartes, 9, 9, 44, 118, 125, 

127, 175, 176, 182, 183, 186, 

280, 402. 
Deschamps, Mile, 49. 
Desfontaines, Abbe, 37, 449. 
Deslandes, 270. 
Destouches, 298, 301, 802, 317, 

317. 
Deventer, 92. 
Dickenson, 273. 



Dickinson, 109. 

Dieskau, General, 90 ff. 

Dion Cassius, 171. 

Ditton, 266. 

Dobson, Austin, 83, 318. 

Dodsley, 96, 281. 

Donatus, 144. 

Donne, Dr, 63. 

Dorat, 308, 309. 

Dryden, 100, 289, JjS. 

Du Bos, 399, 403, 423. 

Ducis, 439. 

Duclos, 105. 

Ducros, L., 16, 485. 

Duhamel, 258, 258. 

Dupre de Saint-Maur, Mme, 

154. 
Duras, Due de, 330, 331. 
Dyche, Thos., 236, 238. 

Eckard, 100. 
Eidous, 239, 1,03, 449. 
Ellis, It. L., 195, 486. 
Eloesser, A., 322. 
Epicurus, 167, 185. 
Epinay, Mme d\ 86, 484. 
Euripides, 351. 

Faguet, E., m, U6, 486. 

Falconet, 279, 430, ±69, 482. 

Fermiere, De La, 93. 

Feverlinus, 272. 

Field, 303. 

Fielding, 338, 369. 

Flamsteed, 189. 

Flaubert, 829. 

Fletcher, G., 306. 

Fontaine, A., $2. 

Fontenelle, 82, 83, 83, 84, 98, 

182, 280, 281, 283, 316, 317, 

317. 
Forster, John, 83. 
Forster, J. Reinhold, 390. 
Foulet, L., k. 






INDEX 



493 



Fowler, Thos., 121, 129, 132, 1,02. 
Franklin, 108 ff., 110, 199, 202. 
Frederick II, 26, 26, 55. 
Frenais, 372. 
Freret, 21,. 
Freron, 112. 
Furetiere, 229. 

Gaiffe, F., 809, 317, 319, 325. 

Galiani, Abbe, 418, 419, 421. 

Gallois, 228. 

Garasse, Pere, 1,1- 

Garrick, 3, 3, 53, 61, 96, 101 
ff., 298, 328 ff., 390, 423, 
430 ff., 1,32, 440, U0, 451. 

Gentleman's Magazine, 87, 189, 
391, 489. 

Geoffrin, Mme, 50, 78, 99. 

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 222, 
222. 

Gessner, 27, 443. 

Gibbon, 82, 97 ff., 104, 117, 
291. 

Glassius, 272. 

Goethe, k, 5, 27, 221, 222, 387, 
388, 457, 457, 482. 

Goldsmith, 81 ff. 

Gordon, 50, 50. 

Gosche, 293. 

Grabovius, 272. 

Graffigny, Mme de, 325. 

Grassineau, 235. 

Gray, 440, M0, 441, 452. 

Gregory family, 88, 93. 

Gregory, St., 143. 

Gretry, 192. 

Greuze, 410, 411, 423, 427. 

Grimm, F. M., 5, 17, 26, 34, 
35, 103, 192, 218, 237, 294, 
315, 818, 332, 398, 423, 432, 
433, 442, 457, 475, 484. 

Gua de Halves. Abbe" du, 239. 

Guido, 116. 



Hale, Edw. E., 110. 

Hallam, H., 226, 221. 

Halley, 189. 

Harrington, 152. 

Harris, John, 229, 230, 232 ff., 

238, 251, 256, 283, 487. 
Hartmann, von, 382. 
Hawkesworth, J., 890, 391, 891, 

488. 
Heath, D. D., 195, 487. 
Hedgcock, F. A., 3, 3, 102, 330. 
Helvetius, 33, 44, 52, 55, 56, 

65, 66, 99, 105, 107, 118, 

169, 210, 287, 395, 469, 

483. 
Henault, President, 105, 318. 
Hertford, Lord, 104. 
Hettner, H., 486. 
Heywood, 306. 
Hill, G. Birkbeck, 112, 1,31. 
Hinchliff, J. E., 160. 
Hinchliffe, J., 160. 
Hobbes, 89, 115, 120, 125, 

133, 172, 274, 277. 
Hoefer, F., 193. 
Hogarth, 410, 411, 412, ±12, 

413, 414, 41h 423, 425 ff., 

428, 430, 1,82, 488. 
Holbach, 33, 56 ff., 65, 88, 89, 

91, 99, 102, 104, 106, 107, 

116, 118, 169, 186, 210, 211, 

214, 340, 358, 423, 469, 485. 
Holdernesse, Lord, 58. 
Holmes, Gervas, 157, 158 ff. 
Homer, 11,5, 336, 351, 356, 

435, 436. 
Hoop (or Hope), 45 ff., 85 

ff., 214, 382, 440, W, 489. 
Hoop, Van der, 87. 
Hope family (see Hoop). 
Horace, 400, 422. 
Hottinguer, 271. 
Howard, W. G., 1,00. 
Huber, 27. 



494 



INDEX 



La Baume, 372. 
La Bruyere, 125. 
La Chaussee, 298, 298, 317, 

325. 
Lafayette, 69. 
La Fontaine, 357. 
Lagrange, 186. 
La Grenee, 424. 
La Harpe, 309. 
Lamarck, 207, 221, 221, 222, 

222, 223. 
Lamb, Chas., 124. 
La Motte, 316, 317. 
Lamozzo, £12. 

T ..,— ™ , ^. , .«v Landois, 317, S18, 320, 320, 325. 
Inchliff, Wm. (or Hmchliff), Landrieu, M., 207, 221. 

160, 160, 161, 207. Lanson, G., 4, 298, 299, 480, 

484. 
Jablonski, J. T., 237. La pj acej 450> 

Jacquier, Pere, 187. La Rochefoucauld, 125, 347. 

Jahrbuch der Literaturge- Larroumet, S18. 

schichte, 293. La Tour, 410. 

James, Dr Robert, 37, 38, 193, La Veze, 392. 

238, 239, 242, 263, 287, k03, Lavoisier, 192, 223. 



Hiibner, 237. 

Huchon, R., 3, S. 

Hugo, V., 319. 

Hume, D., 50, 51, 51, 58, 59, 63, 
64, 75, 80, 101, 101, 104 ff., 
107, 112, 115, 116, 117, 
118, 119, 124, 137, 152, 178, 
355, 464 ff. 

Huss, John, 150. 

Hutcheson, 119, 121, 124, 402, 
403, 1,03, 404. 

Hyde, 271. 

Hypatia, 276. 



487. 
Jodin, Mile, 327, 482. 
Johnson, 230. 
Johnson, General, 90, 91. 
Johnson, Samuel, 52, 75, 112, 

112, 33k, 421, 431, kkO, 442, 

444. 
Joncourt, De 157. 
Josephus, 145. 
Judd, J. W., 220. 
Julian, the emperor, 141. 
Jusserand, J. J., 2, 3, 8. 

Kant, 27, 118, 124, 178, 179. 

Keate, G., 69, 463. 

Kemble, 33k, kSl. 

Kessel, 213. 

Keyser, Dr, 205. 

Klingstad, 477, 478. 

Knight, W., 105, 106. 



Le Blanc, Abbe, 24, 2k, 37, 45, 

100, 115. 
Le Bossu, 399. 

Lebreton, 239, 241, 279, 284. 
Le Brun, 145, 248, 419. 
Le Clerc, 228. 
Leibnitz, 27, 124, 166, 167, 

176, 177, 204, 274, 280, 

383, 385, 386. 
Le Moyne, 104, kU- 
Leonard, 443. 
Le Sage, 338. 
Lespinasse, Mile de, 95, 110, 

215, 358, 372. 
Lessing, 5, 27, 321, 336, Ifll, 

kl2, 457. 
Le Sueur, 145, 248, 419. 
Le Sueur, Pere, 187. 
Le Tourneur, 339, JH1, 442, kk9. 
Levasseur, Therese, 99. 



INDEX 



495 



Leyds, J. J. C, 484. 

Lillo, G., 801, 304 ff., 316, 818, 
319, 320, 821, 323, 408, 451, 
452, 487. 

Livy, 145. 

Locke, 13, 32, 44, 75, 95, 100, 
115, 122, 133, 155, 155, 163, 
170, 171, 172, 175, 177, 
183, 184, 192, 266, 274, 
278 ff., 405, 433, 452, 487. 

Loliee, F., 5. 

Loutherbourg, 427. 

Lucretius, 166, 167, 185, 186, 
186, 220. 

Luther, 150. 

Lyell, 222. 

Macklin, 834. 

Macpherson, 441. 

Macquer, 213. 

Magellan, 391. 

Maillet, De, 207, 221. 

Malebranche, 124, 175, 184, 

281. 
Mandeville, 172. 
Mann, Sir Horace, 76. 
Marcel, 426. 
Marischal, Lord, 59. 
Marivaux, 298, 817, 318, 818, 

365. 
Marmontel, 102, 105. 
Martyh, J., 232. 
Massinger, 303. 
Masson, Prof., 83. 
Maupassant, 368. 
Maupertuis, 207, 208, 221. 
Mayer, 213. 
Meikle, H. W., 464. 
Meister, 851, 484. 
Mercier, Sebastien, 53, 309. 
Meredith, George, 366. 
Metra, $8. 

Michael Angelo, 1,12, 420, 428. 
Mill, John Stuart, 124. 



Mills, John, 238, 239, 263, 

268, 269, 
Milton, 3, 3, 436, 1,36, 440, 1,1,0, 

W, 444. 
Mohammed, 380. ^» 

Moliere, 5, 288, 290, 298. 
Molyneux, 155, 155. 
Monod, G. F., 339. 
Montagu, Mrs, 3, 8. 
Montaigne, 44, 124, 125, 126, 

135, 138, 150, 159, 171, 347, 

392, 395. 
Montesquieu, 3, k, 7, 10, 11, 

12, 12, 33, 60, 69, 98, 124, 

131, 151, 157, 185. 
Monval, 482. 
Moore, Edw., 304, 301,, 310 ff., 

316, 319, 320, 451, 487. 
Morel, Leon, 3, 8. 
Morellet, Abbe\ 102, 469. 
Moreri, 228, 229, 238, 264, 

283. 
Morhof, 229. 
Morize, A., 381. 
Morley, Lord, 2, 5, 16, 110, HI, 

160, 226, 280, 360, 868, 888, 1,11, 

1,55, 1,57, 485. 
Moses, 145, 11,6, 351. 
Motteux, 370. 
Muller, Max, 218. 
Muralt, B. de, 29, 45, 115. 
Miirger, H., 31. 

Naigeon, 16, 52, 115, 168, 185, 

223, 275, 358, 858, 1,01,, 457, 

485. 
Necker, 51. 

Needham, 212, 213, 21k. 
Nettleton, Thos., 156. 
Neufville, De, $65, -J7, }67, 

470. 
Newton, 32, 166, 167, 180, 

183, 181,, 186, 187, 189, 190, 

199, 204. 



496 



INDEX 



Nicholson, Edw., 87. 

Nicolai, 93. 

Nicole, 347. 

Noailles, Marechal de, 258. 

CErsted, 203. 
Oldenburg, 176. 
Osborn, H. F., 220. 
Ossian, 440, 440, 441, 452. 
Otway, 303, 306. 
Ozanam, 230. 

Papillon, F., 457. 

Pardon, Wm, 236. 

Pascal, 9, 125, 126, 267, 456. 

Pasquier, P., 477, #7. 

Petit, Dr, 425. 

Phillips, A., 63. 

Phillips, Miss, 49. 

Pico della Mirandola, 226. 

Pindar, 436. 

Pivati, G., 237. 

Plato, 21, 124, 185, 404, 443. 

Plutarch, 139. 

Pocock, 271. 

Pompadour, Mme de, 463. 

Pope, 95, 119, 124, 150, 152, 

S85, US, 444, 463. 
Pouchet, 21k. 
Poussin, 430, 432. 
Prades, Abbe de, 42, 265, 481. 
Premontval, Mme de, 188. 
Prevost, Abbe, 37, 45, 46, 1$, 

339, 340, 365, 379. 
Prior, 443. 

Rabelais, 370, 387. 

Racine, 63, 307, 332, 415, 421, 

436. 
Rameau, 191. 
Rameau (the nephew), 388, 

389, 397, 456, 482. 
Ramsay, Allan, 418. 
Raphael, 146, 4*6, 430. 



Rapin, 399. 

Rapson, 32. 

Rawley, Wm., 486. 

Regnard, 298, 325. 

Reinach, J., 485. 

Renan, 393. 

Revue anthropologique, 207. 

Revue d'histoire litteraire, 4. 

Revue du XVIIIe si&cle, 381. 

Revue scientifique, 193. 

Reynolds, 421. 

Riccoboni, Mme, 330, 450. 

Richardson, S., 13, 37, 63, 78, 
307, 318, 323, 338, 339 ff., 
360, 361, 364, 365, 365, 366, 
366, 367, 368, 370, 371, 379, 
389, 394, 397, 408, 409, 

450, 451, 452, 482, 488. 
Ringelberg, 226. 
Robertson, J. M., 121, 124, 129, 

329, 487. 

Robinet, 207, 220. 

Romilly, 114. 

Romilly, Sir Samuel, 105, 106, 
112 ff., 115, 470. 

Rosenkranz, K., 16, 292, 292, 
485. 

Rouelle, l'Aine", 81, 192, 192, 
211, 213. 

Rousseau, J. J., 2, 4, 10, 12, 
12, 13, 29, 33, 80, 80, 81, 86, 
98, 99, 114, 114, 116, 138, 
143, 192, 235, 277, 279, 287, 
365, 447, 464, 469, 470. 

Rowe, 303, 306. 

Rubens, 419. 

Sainte-Beuve, 451, 485. 
St. James' Chronicle, 334. 
Saintsbury, G., 92, 373, 381, 382, 

451, 488. 
Saint-Simon, 456. 
Sallo, Denis de, 227. 
Sallust, 145. 



INDEX 



497 



Sandwich, Lord, 390. 

Saunderson, 22, 155 ff., 207, 
277, 392, 487, 489. 

Saurin, 310, 314, 315. 

Savage, Ml. 

Savery, Capt. Thomas, 251. 

Schafer, E. A., 211,. 

Scherer, E., 485. 

Scheuchzerus, 272. 

Schiller, 5, 27, 457. 

Schookius, 261, 271. 

Schopenhauer, 382. 

Sedaine, 438. 

Segur, De, 78, 358. 

Sellius, Gottfried, 238. 

Seneca, 126, 171, 111, 483. 

Sevigne, Mme de, 456. 

Shaftesbury, 32, 41, 50, 75, 
90, 115, 119 ff., 155, 156, 
163, 164, 161,, 165, 166, 170, 
171, 172, 174, 171,, 175, 180, 
194, 274, 296, 307, 320, 
323, 328, 329, 385, 393, 396, 
401, 402, 402, 403, 404, 405, 
408, 450, 451, 452, 487. 

Shakespeare, 2, 3, 5, 62, 104, 
135, 291, 32G, 327, 332, 436 
ff., MO, 451, 463. 

Shaw, P., 232. 

Sichel, W., 4, k, 95. 

Slawkenbergius, 577. 

Smollett, 52, 93, 94, 338, 369, 
371. 

Socin, 150. 

Socrates, 118, 133, 199. 

Solario, Andrea, $20. 

Sophocles, 309, 316, 321, 351. 

Southerne, 303, 306. 

Spedding, J., 195 ff., 486. 

Spence, J., 412, 1,12, 4I6, 423, 
488. 

Spencer, 271. 

Spencer, Herbert, 124, 168. 



Spinoza, 120, 175, 176, 274, 

280, 381, 386. 
Stael, Mme de, 26. 
Stahl, 199, 204. 
Stair, Lord, 33. 
Stanyan, Temple, 37, 268, 287. 
Steele, 302. 
Stendhal, 319. 
Stephen, Leslie, 63, 152, 153, 

31,2, 357, 1,02, 488. 
Sterne, 78, 92, 92, 94 ff., 369 

ff., 389, 394, 451, 488. 
Sticoti, A. F., 103, 331. 
Suard, 344, 469, 479. 
Swift, 100, 128, 150, 289, 371, 

371, US, 463. 

Taylor, 32, 189. 

Telleen, J. M., 3, 3. 

Tennyson, 304. 

Terence, 321, 482. 

Texte, J., 2, 5, 8, 29, 29k, 3W, 

480. 
Thackeray, 35. 
Thomas, W., 3, 3. 
Thomson, J., 3, 3, 442, 1&2, 

443, 444. 
Thorndike, A. H., 301,. 
Tillotson, 95. 
Tindal, 115, 128, 169. 
Titian, 416. 

Toland, 115, 119, 128, 169. 
Tourneux, M., 15, 17, 8!,, 109, 

192, 270, 474, 1,75, £76, 484, 

485. 
Toussaint, 239, 449. 
Toynbee, Mrs Paget, 76, 111. 
Tronchin, F., 438. 
Tronchin, H., 438. 
Trudaine de Montigny, 318. 
Tull, Jethro, 258, 258. 
Turgot, 51, 80. 

Upper Ossory, Countess of, 
111. 



498 



INDEX 



Valesius, 272. 

Vandeul, Mme de, 16, 30, 31, 
38, 351, 457, 485. 

Van Loo, kl&, 423. 

Vergil, 436, 442. 

Vernet, 436. 

Villemain, 2, 167. 

Vise\ 228. 

Volland, Mile, 36, 45, 46, 57, 
59, 84, 85, 93, 95, 100, 105, 
108, 310, 340, 341, 342, 343, 

382, 4*8, 441, 481. 
Voltaire, 2, 4, 4, 5, 5, 7, 10, 

11, 12, 12, 17, 23, 23, 28, 
29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 40, 41, 
42, 44, 45, 46, 46, 56, 69, 
69, 74, 78, 82, 84, 87, 98, 
99, 115, 119, 124, 126, 135, 
142, 150, 152, 155, 163, 166, 
167, 168, 169, 180, 183, 
212, 258, 261, 291, 300, 
303, 317, 320, 327, 371, 381, 

383, 384, 385, 385, 386, 394, 
436, 437, 437, 438, 1,38, 447, 
U7, 458, 463, 464. 

Wallis, Capt., 390, 391, 391, 
392, 488. 



Walpole, Horace, 76, 76, 77 ff., 

99, 104, 110, 115, 338, 371. 
Warburton, 440. 
Ward, A. W., 305, 307, 308, 487. 
Warton, Thos., 421. 
Watteau, 410. 
Webb, D., 412, 1,12, 413, 414, 

1,16, 418, 419, 420, 421, 488. 
Wheeler, Granville, 157. 
Whiston, 156. 
Wilkes, John, 51, 51, 67, 70, 

101, 107 ff., 112, 117, 474 

ff. 
Wilkes, Rich., 157. 
Willoughby, 260. 
Winckelmann, 108, 1,12, 432. 
Wolf, 281, 404. 

Wollaston, 153, 153, 155, 171. 
Woolston, 150. 

Young, 3, 3, 440, 442, 44%, 452. 

Zedler, J. H., 237, 282. 
Zeisoldius, 272. 
Zeno, 380, 386. 
Zola, 368. 
Zoroaster, 281. 
Zuylichem, M. de, 301. 
Zwingle, 150. 



VITA 

I was born May 8, 1884, in Mare, one of the 
Loyalty Islands, a dependency of the French 
colony of ]\ T ew Caledonia. I took the classical 
course in the Lycee de Tournon-sur-Rhone from 
1894 to 1901, graduating then (Baccalaureat 
Lettres-Philosophie) from the University of 
Grenoble. I studied in the Lycee Ampere, Lyon, 
from 1901 to 1905, for the entrance examina- 
tions to the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris ; 
this School I entered in 1905, and there I took 
the courses in the English language and litera- 
ture, from 1905 till 1909. I attended the 
courses of Professors Beljame, Legouis, Morel, 
Huchon, Cazamian, as well as some other courses 
at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the College 
de France ; I also pursued studies in English at 
Oxford, where I resided during 1906 and part 
of 1907, attending some courses under Pro- 
fessors Raleigh and De Selincourt, and at Wil- 
liams College, Massachusetts, where I was 
French instructor in 1907-1908. In 1908 I 
499 



500 VITA 

translated into French a work by Professor 
Archibald Cary Coolidge, of Harvard Univer- 
sity, which appeared as " Les Etats-Unis puis- 
sance mondiale" (Paris, 1908). I obtained 
the degree of Licencie-es-Lettres (Langues 
Vivantes, Anglais) in the University of Paris 
in 1906, the Diplome d'Etudes Superieures, 
with a dissertation on " Thomas Warton, pre- 
cnrseur du Romantisme anglais," in 1908, and 
the Agregation d' Anglais in 1909. 

Since 1909 I have been Instructor, then 
Assistant-Professor in French in the Normal 
College of the City of New York. 



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